office phone systems
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If it's only for three phones you could easily get away with an old PC running Asterisk. It's what I've got at home (albeit a not so old Dell i5 I had lying around). With a PCIe FXO/FXS card, simple to setup and it just works, I've probably gone a bit OTT with the phones (24 extensions) and that's a mix of corded, cordless and softphones (Gigaset, X-Lite, Zoiper & Cisco (with SIP firmware)). I'm also using a Cisco/Linksys SPA3102 hooked up to an old anologue phone which gives me a backup should the power go off.
You could probably get Asterisk running on a Raspberry Pi if it's only for three users, the difficulty would be getting it linked up to the phone line, I tried with the SPA3102 to do this and found it to be very clunky and slow (works fine making an old phone an extension though). That could be picked up for around £35, same with the SPA3102, and then a few Cisco 7940 phones off the bay could be had for about £20 each. Dependant on budget it could be quite a cheap easy option.
Edit; unless the incoming line could be a SIP line, that makes things a whole lot easier, on my setup I've got the BT line going through the FXO card and a SIP line through Sipgate where users dial 007 to use, through the BT line I've setup the dial plan to just work as a normal phone (ie, no dialling 9 to call out) and local numbers don't need the area code.
You could probably get Asterisk running on a Raspberry Pi if it's only for three users, the difficulty would be getting it linked up to the phone line, I tried with the SPA3102 to do this and found it to be very clunky and slow (works fine making an old phone an extension though). That could be picked up for around £35, same with the SPA3102, and then a few Cisco 7940 phones off the bay could be had for about £20 each. Dependant on budget it could be quite a cheap easy option.
Edit; unless the incoming line could be a SIP line, that makes things a whole lot easier, on my setup I've got the BT line going through the FXO card and a SIP line through Sipgate where users dial 007 to use, through the BT line I've setup the dial plan to just work as a normal phone (ie, no dialling 9 to call out) and local numbers don't need the area code.
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I would still do VoIP but get a dedicated ADSL line for the task - 500Kbps up is still enough for around 4 calls. An analogue line limits you to one call at a time, as well as being expensive if you ever outgrow it. You can get a new number from a new provider and then keep it as you grow without having to deal with number porting and other opportunities for things to go wrong.
If you wanted to utilise the analogue line because people already call it (or wanted the option to fail over to dialling out over it for emergency calls) then the Patton SmartNode gateways, despite looking like a prop from WarGames, are good products and pop up on eBay a lot for decent prices.
If you wanted to utilise the analogue line because people already call it (or wanted the option to fail over to dialling out over it for emergency calls) then the Patton SmartNode gateways, despite looking like a prop from WarGames, are good products and pop up on eBay a lot for decent prices.
