[Asterisk-Users] School design question

[Chris Hobbs]

Steven Critchfield wrote:

>You may want to continue having a general access PA that is just like
>your currently installed system. Your PA probably needs to be easily
>understood in the hallways as well as the classrooms. Cost of wire and
>speakers are much lower than an IP phone and the extra power
>requirements and possibly buggy firmware.
>  
>
Good points. It looks like the traditional paging systems we use allow 
for direct connection from any PBX.

>If you aren't planning on data to the classroom, you probably are
>already behind. You probably should plan on running 2 cat5 cables to
>every room. At worse, you use 1 cat5 for plain old telecom. You at least
>have options at that point. See about running them all to nice patch
>panels so that you just make jumpers from the kind of network you want
>over to the port that needs it.
>  
>
Should have been clearer in the original e-mail - we will already have 
6-8 CAT5 drops to every classroom for hooking up computers and printers. 
The question really comes down to do we put in an additional CAT5 drop 
for the phone instead of cat3, and then what types of phones to put on 
those drops.

A couple of direct replies have already strongly suggested using CAT5 
across the board, even if we go with a traditional phone system. This 
makes a lot of sense to me.

>Do consider that you don't have to purchase fancy phones for the
>classrooms. You could use analog telephones that are cheap to replace
>and use a group of channel banks to support the phones. Maybe a bit more
>expensive than the IP phones, but it is tried and proven technology.
>  
>
I've already given thought to this for retrofitting our existing sites 
when the time comes (I figure once we have the new school working on 
Asterisk switching the others will be much easier to sell).

I guess the question comes down to which of three possible network 
designs to use (once wiring is assumed to be CAT5 across the board):

A) Analog classroom phone -> Paging/Intercom System -> Paging/Telco 
gateway -> Asterisk
     * Limits number of clasroom calls that can be made to capacity of 
gateway

B) IP Classroom Phone -> Asterisk -> Paging/Telco Gateway -> Paging System

C) Analog classroom phone -> Channel Bank -> Asterisk -> Paging/Telco 
Gateway -> Paging System



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Chris Hobbs       Silver Valley Unified School District
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