[asterisk-users] Asterisk as a distributed paging system

[Philipp von Klitzing]

Hi!

> I need the system to be resilient to any network partition, so that
> anyone can send announces from any mic to all the reachable clients.
> I'd need also to page a subset of all the speakers. 

Most of the major phone vendors (that are employed by the users of this 
list) have support for multi-cast of some sort. In recent firmware 
release notes I have read that SNOM has now also added a feature to feed 
multicast directly from a phone (and not just play multicast audio on the 
speaker as long as the phone is not in use).

> I'm currently using some software I wrote which sends voice over
> multicast RTP and coordinates all the sites with multicast messages. 

app_page has been around for quite some in Asterisk, and the new Asterisk 
1.8 now also adds the channel driver "MulticastRTP".

> Is there a way asterisk could be of use, or would I need to bend it
> too much? 

Look here:
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+cmd+Page
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+Paging+and+Intercom

I have made good experience with MAST for multicasting SNOM phones: 
http://www.aelius.com/njh/mast/

Philipp