[Asterisk-Users] Help - is voip good for in-house calls?

[Greg Broiles]

Asterisk should work fine for this application - but you and/or your
users may be expecting the Grandstreams to look/act like traditional
key system phones, where you've got a bunch of buttons labeled
"Computer Room" or "Joe" and "Bob", or whatever, where you can press
that button to call that extension.

The Budgetones don't do that - users will need to remember (or have an
extension list to tell them) that the Computer Room is at extension
110, and Joe is at 111, and Bob is 112, and so forth.

My suggestion is that you buy 2 Budgetones and set up Asterisk on an
old PC - so your total investment in the experiment will be < $200.
Get that up & running, and let users play with the phones and the
functions you can provide. If they like it, great. If they don't like
it, you're not out much money, and you ought to be able to resell the
Budgetones for something like 80% of the new price on Ebay or
whatever. You can get set up with incoming and outgoing IAX
connections via someone like Voicepulse or Nufone or IPKall (or some
combination thereof) so you can even let people experiment with
incoming and outgoing call quality and behavior without spending a lot
on interface cards.

You might also look at some of the other VoIP phones, which aren't a
whole lot more money and might look more like the PBX/key phones that
people are used to. The Budgetones are more similar to consumer/home
telephones from the early 1990's.

-- 
Greg Broiles, JD, EA
gbroiles at gmail.com (Lists only. Not for confidential communications.)
Law Office of Gregory A. Broiles
San Jose, CA