Have any geeks on the forum got a nice and easy solution for routing an incoming PSTN line to a set of VOIP phones for incoming/outgoing calls?

Looking for a device that will do this without much jiggery pokery. We looked at asterisk but the learning curve was too high.

What you are in effect looking for is an IP phone system… there are lots out there. Asterisk is an Opensource version but does require a bit of learning. Most of the others are made and sold as ‘appliances’ by companies such as Cisco, Panasonic, Avaya etc. You can also buy pre-configured Asterix solutions.

I’ve put quite a few of these in for customers (run a IT/telecoms company – mainly Cisco in the past). You can get refurbished units now that are reasonably cheap. There are some that have a decent web interface which makes configuration/administration easier, but most do require some half decent knowledge of networking/telecoms etc. for you to install them yourself.

The other alternative, if you don’t want to get your hands too dirty, would be to get someone to do the initial build for you and then hand over with a bit of training so that you could look after it from there?

Alternatively ditch the PSTN lines and just buy a VOIP service from a provider and leave it up to them?

Depends on what you are trying to achieve, how many users, what you want to spend etc. etc.

You can get hosted systems that can handle the calls and require little or no setting up from the end user perspective. I work for a telecoms company, so I’d be happy to discuss with you offline?
paul AT univoice DOT co DOT uk
You’ll still need some sort of internet connectivity, so you may need to retain the PSTN for that purpose.

Basically we want to keep our pstn line, have incoming calls to it routed to ip phone and outgoing calls via IP or PSTN

I used Trixbox. The free version.
It’s an Asterisk solution but with a nice frontend.

Our work use Askterix, we have one in the UK and one in the US and can route between them depending on the country code dialled. Clever bit of kit.

It’s gone legacy by Draytek now but they support their products for quite some time, see if you can hunt down one of these >>

http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/legacy/vigor-ippbx-2820

We have the Cisco solution at work – utter shite in my opinion, totally erratic – my desk phone has a life of its own and had a random response to any button press. Pick it up and sometimes it answers the call and sometimes it can’t be arsed….

We have the Cisco solution at work – utter shite in my opinion, totally erratic – my desk phone has a life of its own and had a random response to any button press. Pick it up and sometimes it answers the call and sometimes it can’t be arsed….

I’d suggest that could be a poor implementation then ff… we have some folks who have had their system for many years and had nothing but stability… If your IT peeps need some help with it – I might know some guys who can sort them out 😉

If you’re looking for an Enterprise solution, I work for a telecommunications / managed services company. Can hook you up with a salesman if you need.