[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk with Ericsson MD110 PBX

[Christopher Lee]

I don't have any direct experience with the MD110's and Asterisk, but I
would envisage the MD110 digital phones are very much a proprietary
protocol, as with Nortel digital phones, you can't mix and match between
different vendors.

It may be possible to get Ericsson (as well as Nortel and others) digital
phones working with Asterisk, I doubt via ADSI, more likely via Dialogic
voice boards from Intel.

I know after some digging through intel.com for info on their Dialogic voice
boards I found some technical info on the signaling used for Nortel digital
phones.

To successfully get a Ericsson/Nortel/etc digital phone working with
Asterisk you'd need to firstly purchase the Dialogic voice board(s), then
write the drivers for the Dialogic board for Linux (or maybe they already
exist, I haven't checked), then some more drivers/plug-ins to get the
Dialogic and the vendor-specific digital phones working with Asterisk. 

I imagine for the most part, depending on how many phones you have and
budget, it really wouldn't be economically feasible - in the long run I
think you'd find replacing the phones with SIP handsets and trying to sell
off the old digital handsets to recoup some of the upgrade cost would be the
way to go.

Actually if memory serves, the main purpose of the Intel Dialogic boards is
actually interfacing the PC (ie Asterisk or other software) to the digital
ports of the proprietary PBX, rather than directly interfacing the PC to the
proprietary digital phones. 

So for instance if you wanted to smoothly transfer calls between the
Asterisk SIP extensions and the Ericsson MD110 handsets with all the caller
ID details, or perhaps run a fancy IVR or auto-attendant system accessible
to the MD110 handsets via Asterisk then they'd be ideal. Otherwise you have
to interface via other digital trunk methods or Analog extensions and may
not get access to as many features as you can through the digital extension
ports.

Even if you can use the dialogic boards directly with the proprietary
handsets, I can't see the solution really scaling anywhere near as well as
the proprietary digital cards that plug into the MD110 PBX itself.  

Of course it would be nice to see the Ericsson/Nortel phones recycled for
use with Asterisk systems, but at this point in time I'm not sure how
feasible this is.

I do believe Nortel were working on (or perhaps have now released) a small
black-box solution that plugs into the existing proprietary Meridian handset
and then plugs into Ethernet to essentially turn the phone into a VoIP
handset - not sure if it uses SIP protocol.

If Ericsson have a black-box solution like this available, then it might be
a feasible approach, depending on the cost per box and the existing network
infrastructure, as ideally you'd have the black boxes powered over Ethernet
so you can install UPS' in the communications cabinets to ensure the phones
and network are available during power outages.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-users-admin at lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-users-
> admin at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Julian Pawlowski
> Sent: Wednesday, 2 June 2004 7:28 PM
> To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
> Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Asterisk with Ericsson MD110 PBX
> 
> I was just wondering if someone has experiences to use Asterisk in an
> existing Ericsson MD110 environment. Particulary I'd like to know if it is
> possible to use the MD110's system phones directly connected to Asterisk.
> 
> I'm not very familiar with it but would it be possible to use ADSI with
> these phones? Are they more like analog or more like digital phones or is
> the protocol even more proprietary?
> 
> 
> Regards
> Julian Pawlowski
> 
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