So here at work, my previous boss quoted a small number ($4400) for replacing the entire phone system at one of our smaller offices. There are two problems with that quote; 1. It seems to have been pulled out the thin air. 2. That is pretty damn low unless all you wanted to do was to offer them
a couple of lines that did nothing. We checked with all the usual vendors that we deal with in relation to phone systems and none of them gave us any quotes. So we were left with two options, start getting quotes from vendors or roll our own system.

Long story short, after a meeting with a vendor that was trying to sell Avaya we decided to roll our own. A few months back I was reading an issue of Linux Format that included a copy of TrixBox on the dvd and they had a little blurb about it on one of the pages. I was intrigued as I had read about Asterisk here and there on the net for a while and I had even read a little tutorial, but I had no need for a PBX at the time so all that just got filed away in the brain. Now here comes along what is basically a Linux distro that includes all the software you need to set up a PBX with easy to use web based tools that most anybody can administrate… You had to be kidding I said to myself.

We were in the need for a PBX and TrixBox was the solution, we downloaded the ISO and installed it on a spare Dell that we had sitting around. We started testing it with X-Lite soft phones on our Windows, Linux and Mac workstations and it was great. Within 20 minutes we had a full blown PBX with Extensions, Voicemail, IVR’s, Call Queues, Music on Hold and much much more. After the successful soft phone test we purchased three VOIP phones to test with and a Digium FXO Wildcard TDM04B.

We picked up a Linksys SPA942, a Grandstream Budgetone 102 and a Grandstream GXP-2000. The SPA942 and the GXP-2000 are great phones. The Budgetone 102 is basically crap and I only suggest picking it up if you need a sub $50 phone for testing. Right now we are still trying to determine if we are going to go with the SPA942 or the GXP-2000.

The TDM04B was so simple to setup in TrixBox its crazy. It detected that the card was installed I just modified the Trunk in FreePBX to only allow one channel (We only had one analog line hooked up), after that it worked just fine. I could dial out and people could call the machine and get dumped into a queue or IVR and it would ring one of the phones.

We still have more testing before we implement this in a production setting but based on the testing so far, its going to be a go. What about the $4400 budget you ask? Well lets break that down:

1 x 24 Port POE Switch: $1700
11 x Voip Phones: $1430
1 x Digium Card: $421
1 x PBX Computer: $650

Total: $4201

We are sitting at $4200 for a full blown PBX and the prices are over estimates.

Until Next time….