> I am setting up a phone system for a small office. > The office will have 5-8 phones and a fax line. > There are 4 hunt lines coming into the office.
> assumed that I would buy voip phones and connect > all the phones to a private ethernet network. You can do this and may it would be the natural way to start, since it's cheaper. I'd recommend buying or borrwing one decent phone to do some testing. I use a Polycom ip500 at home to talk on our office lines and that works very well at around $220 new. I also have an iaxY (~$100) at home and can connect any phone I want. Right now it has a crappy but cordless Seimens on it. > Is there any reason why I would need to consider using > analog phones and FXS cards? Seems to me the cheapest > way is with voip phones and voice quality should be good > since the phones are on a private network that only has > voice traffic. A factor no one here mentions is user psychological comfort. If the phones are manned by ordinary people, what are they expecting to use as phones? there are millions of non-geek types out there who would abhor seeing a Cisco on their desk and want a phone with a few buttons that works like the phones they've seen all their lives. Not everyone craves phones that look like the Pentagon offices. I know because I have two users and they both are using analog phones to a TDM400 FXS. It happens that I have two X100 FXO for our two POTS lines and one TDM400 in a P3 box with 512G RAM for the 3 phones. I have a crummy analogue phone for me just in case, but also have a Linksys/Sipura and two IAX phones on my desk for testing/evaluation. I mostly use the Sipura at the moment. Oh and also, if the asterisk box fails for any reason, having analog phones can keep phone service available while waiting for the repairs. Especially good are non-powered phones that will work even while AC power is off. _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users