vicidial.org

Hi everyone,
im planing to implement a IPBX system in our office but dont want to remove the legacy panasonic PBX system that we currently have. I am planing to use vicibox. I want to know is this possible and if yes then which is the better choice? Issabel or Vicibox? and if ever what kind of hardware i will be needing to do so?

How does your legacy PBX currently connect to the PSTN?

mflorell wrote:How does your legacy PBX currently connect to the PSTN?

thanks for the reply.
we are using a Panasonic KX-TA616 and the 6 main phone lines are coming in using copper wires. it's an old system. we have 6 PSTN phone lines and 24 local extensions.

Asterisk(and by extension VICIdial) do not work very well on old copper POTS lines. There are analog cards that you can buy from Digium to be able to connect them to your Asterisk/VICIdial server, but keep in mind it won't be able to detect line state 100% of the time.

mflorell wrote:Asterisk(and by extension VICIdial) do not work very well on old copper POTS lines. There are analog cards that you can buy from Digium to be able to connect them to your Asterisk/VICIdial server, but keep in mind it won't be able to detect line state 100% of the time.

Thanks for the reply. but how the integration with the Panasonic KX-TA616 will work?

Good question, I'm not familiar with that piece of equipment. You should be able to installed a few Digium analog cards in your Asterisk server and connect the POST lines to the Asterisk server and the PBX to the Asterisk server and then through some complicated configurations be able to dial through the Asterisk server from the PBX. I've never done that with analog lines, but I have done it with T1s many years ago.

There be two ways to accomplish this:
1. Using a FXS ATA/gateway.
2. Using a FXS card in your Asterisk.

The less annoying way to do this is option 1. You can buy, for example, a Grandstream GXW4008 and attach extension lines from your Panasonic. Then, configure a SIP trunk from the asterisk box to the gateway. So, your ViciDial will have available some extensions on your Panasonic, been able to receive calls from it and establishing new ones to it, using the respective dial rules if configured on the Panasonic.

Option 2 requires an analog FXS card like the OpenVox A810 with some FXS400 modules. For this to work, you need to install the latest OpenVox module tarball from their site and configure a DAHDI trunk, grouping the FXS ports in one group. Is not that hard, and there is plenty of examples available.

I have tested both setups with ViciDial and it works, but as Matt pointed out, the CPD does not always works as reliably as one wants.

Hope this helps.