[Asterisk-Users] Zone Paging

[Rich Adamson]

> I see a lot of chatter in the archives about intercom and paging, but 
> has anyone addressed zone paging?  Each of the 50 telephones in a large 
> clinic would be members of one or more paging zones.  Someone could then 
> page Dr. X in zone #1.  Would this be possible with analog phones?  SIP?

Summarizing from memory only, I believe this has been discussed more then
once on the list and usually comes down to... what device(s) provide an
auto-answer extension and includes an audio output jack that can be
plugged into a paging amplifier?

The two most common suggestions (from memory again) has been:
 1. Use of the sound card on the asterisk machine (which sort of implies
    a limit of one paging zone), or,
 2. Use a sip phone (Cisco 7960 with v6 as one example), configure the
    phone to support auto-answer, and connect the external headset to
    the paging amp. (Implies one sip phone per paging zone.)

I've not tried either, so not sure of success/failure rates or problems.

Seems like a fair number of people have problems getting the sound card
to play nicely with asterisk, and most of the chatter seems to be oriented
around sound card driver issues, etc.

Don't know if the ata-186 supports auto-answer in current software, but if
it did, jury-rigging a matching transformer as a source of zone audio
would not seem like it would be very difficult. (Anyone know whether the
186 can be configured for auto answer?)

Rich