[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk as plain PABX in call centre

[Greg Hill]

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004, jurgen wrote:

> > Of course you can do this, but you will need a channel bank for all
> > those non-VoIP phones you want. You will probably want to use T1 channel
> > banks with the TE4xx cards. One E1 coming in plus 2 or three T1 channel
> > banks.
>
> I guess what I'm missing here is *how*. How does Asterisk know what to
> do with all the extra buttons on these phones? How does it know what to
> do with the LCD screen? Some of the buttons simply send DTMF into the
> PABX, but there are other ones that are specially programmed lines etc
> etc. Surely there's some kind of protocol involved right now in the way
> the phones talk to the PABX. I'm not even sure of what to look for in
> this regard.

Hang on a minute.. are these phones a normal analog phone (ie could be
plugged into the pstn) or are they Fujitsu phones, designed only to work
with the Fujitsu PABX? Or, in other words, can your fax/answering/etc
devices connect to any port on the Fujitsu, or are there only certain
ports they'll work on (and the other ports are for Fjuitsu phones only)?

If the Fujitsu phones are standard analog phones then you'll be able to
plug them into a channel bank. I'm not familiar with your phones, so I
couldn't say what you would be able to do with the LCDs and extra buttons.
But if they are not standard analog phones, then you may be out of luck.
In that case, the only option I know of would be to keep them connected to
your existing PABX and connect that to asterisk. Then additional phones
(analog through channel bank or fxs adapter sipura/cisco/etc, or voip
phone) could be connected to asterisk.

Greg