[TriLUG] Options for replacing Panasonic PBX with Asterisk

[Rick DeNatale]

I woke up this morning to my wife telling me that our phone system
seems to be dead.

We've got a Panasonic TA-624 system at the house.   It seems to have
reacted badly to last night's storm.  It did this once before, and I
had to reset it and reprogram it.  This time, it doesn't even seem to
want to power up.  It's strange because it's well protected both with
a whole house surge protector on the meter, and with a phone line
protector.  Nothing else in the house seems to have been affected,
including a wireless phone which is in parallel with the Panasonic
system behind the same phone line surge suppressor.  That seems like
it would make it hard to pursue as an insurance issue, either with the
homeowners policy, or with the insurance provided by Wake Electric
with the whole house protection.

So I'm faced with fixing this system, or replacing it with an asterisk box.

Of course my preference would be asterisk, new toy, more
programmability, configuration backup, etc. etc. The main concern is
cost.  Right now, the Panasonic system has capability for 4 (or it
might be 8) incoming PSTN lines, although I'm only using 1 at the
moment, and 16 internal lines, of which we are using 12 if I'm
counting correctly.  We've also got 8 proprietary Panasonic phones,
which would be useless in an Asterisk system. Of course basic phones
these days are pretty cheap.  We'd be losing some of the function
though like intercom and station buttons and indicators, which is
somewhat troublesome.

But that seems to be adding up to quite a few FXS cards, and a lot of
money.  Some of these extensions might be paired to save the need for
quite so many ports, but...

Unfortunately, the budget is going to be pretty slim for this.  Are
there reasonable alternatives?  I've also looked at things like the
Digium IAXy which would be nice from a wiring point of view (all of
our internal phone lines are Cat-5 running back to a pair of Home
Director structured wiring boxes).  But $100 a pop, is too painful to
consider.

Any thoughts?

--
Rick DeNatale

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