Home phone system

[steveg]

Can anyone recommend a cheap phone system for home use?

 

We are currently building a new house in the garden which my parents will live in. The main analogue phone line comes into the comms cab in the main house, and at the moment is distributed over cat 5 to an analogue phone. We are running cat 5 underground to the new house, so it will be on the same network and can will also allow 1 analogue phone to be connected directly to the phone line if we want to.

 

What we want to achieve is the ability to call between the 2 houses internally, and transfer external calls to the other building if necessary. I'm thinking of using an old atom based pc I have to run a software pbx on, but can't find any cheap way of getting the analogue incoming phone line into the system? Also would need 2 cheap ip phones. If anyone has any suggestions it would be appreciated!

 

Steve

[plexer]

Ditch the analogue and go for a pure ip system?

 

Ben

[m25man]

Look at the Gigaset N300IP Hybrid system. Incredible piece of kit for the money.

[pcstru]

How geeky are you? You can run asterisk on a cheap atom based PC with an analogue card handling a line in and up to three out. If you want to ditch the analogue side and you dialled your Geek up to 11, one of the new Pi's would probably cut it. Then plug in any IP phone or configure softphones on available network devices.

[jamesreedersmith]

look at asterisk/trixbox and get a pbx interface card for an FXO line, OpenVox A400P01 - 1 FXO and then add ip phones as needed (grandstream are good phones for the price)

[steveg]

Want to keep the incoming analogue line as we need it for broadband anyway, and don't trust the connection enough to go ip for incoming calls, at least if I'm away they can still use the directly connected analogue phone if the server has crashed!

 

That interface card looks ideal, all I could find before were gateway devices which were around £200.

 

Is asterisk the best software on to go for? I had a look at 3cx and was tempted by it running on a Windows box.

 

Steve

[pcstru]

Is asterisk the best software on to go for? I had a look at 3cx and was tempted by it running on a Windows box.

3cx has a good reputation for being easy to use. There are some good asterisk based packages (I use PBX in a Flash) that are easyish to use. For me, I like open source and wanted to learn about Astersik. It should be relatively easy to look at both in a VM or swap if you find you really can't get on with whatever you choose.