Finance Q&A

New office phone system, non ISDN solution?

Q. We will shortly be moving to a new office. We've so far made use of a fairly bog-standard ISDN PBX solution. For a number of reasons, we'd like to use only analogue lines at our new location. The requirements are: 6 separate incoming numbers, ringing 6 different phones 3 concurrent phone calls (minimum) ability to hold/transfer between the phones 6 separate voicemail boxes If we can do this with a fully DECT solution, all the better. Any ideas on how to achieve this, particularly the 6 incoming numbers, without using ISDN, would be much appreciated. I am not interested in a VoIP system at the present time.

A. I don't know how many channels DECT supports, but I'd be surprised if it couldn't do 6 in one room. I'm willing to have a go anyway - the outlay is quite small, and it would be nice not to have to wire up the new office for phones. Well my initial response is to say to use an asterisk based system, but with FXO and FXS cards, gives you the ability to go to VOIP in the future, though I'm not sure why you're concerned about quality when presumably you'd be using VOIP to a local (LAN) server then to PSTN. Of course your other option is low-tech... Featureline and Individual answering machines. I know the feeling, we use it at work and I can't even get caller display on my phone, the company IT dept say it can't be provided. Are they fobbing me off, I wonder..? And why do I have to put a # before 1471..?! On the topic of Featureline, is there a list of the "features" anywhere..?! Almost any PABX will allow any number to ring all phones or pre-defined groups, if one member of the group is on the phone the other extensions will still ring. Some will allow delayed ringing so one extension would normally ring for a few seconds before others did so. The private side of the exchange isn't really an issue. The problem will be that with 6 discrete numbers on 6 lines each number can only be in use for one conversation. So if 123456 is in use anyone else calling it will get an engaged tone even though the other 5 lines may be free in the office. This is unlike ISDN where the channels and numbers are independent. With ISDN if you have 6 channels all can be in use for calls to one of the 6 numbers or if 5 are in use anyone calling any of the other 5 numbers will get through on the one spare channel. There are analogue services offering one number spanning many lines but I'm not sure if they can work in parallel with 6 independent numbers. Even if it did it would make it impossible to tell which number the call was coming in on - analogue PABXs simply identify the number by its physical wire.