Hi
I am in the UK, if that helps...
I need to set up a phone system between my house and my office. The house is connected to the office by a single length (85 metres) of CAT5e cable.
This Cat5e cable is part of my internal LAN, connecting the office via an ADSL router (in the house) to the internet.
I have a standard BT POTS telephone service and ADSL Internet connection on the BT line.
I want to be able to make telephone calls from my office, transfer calls to and from my office & house, and make internal House to Office "intercom" type calls. Additionally I want the Internet connection in the office to be still available at all times.
I also want to use DECT type walk about phones in the house, connecting to the BT POTS line.
VOIP Telephony going out to the Internet is a nice to have but not essential.
Which equiptment should I buy from OBi to achieve the above ?
What telephone sets should I buy to use at the office and house end?
Thanks
Corker,
Firstly, I do not work for Obihai.
I'm not sure OBI is the best solution for what you require. If voip is not a strong requirement, then maybe a small pbx is what you need. £130 will buy you a small PBX, 2 exchange lines and six extensions (from Maplin). Say ext 1 in house could be a dect base unit and ext 2 in office a plain wired phone. I guess you have 2 spare pairs in your cat5 cable to get the phone to the office.
An OBi110 is an option, but only if you are willing to use a softphone on your office computer as the office phone. Then the phone in the house plugged into the main OBi unit could be a dect base unit. This does have the advantage of giving you the option of having two voip providers available to your house phone and office softphone as well as BT.
There are ways of using two OBi units to do what you want, but the configuring starts to get very complicated for what is really only a simple requirement.
Considering that the Raspberry is a UK product, you might consider a full blown Asterisk server on a low cost hardware. It is relatively easy to install the PBX in a flash, since they offer a lot of help on their site. This may set a new standard in pbx setups.
VoIP on Steroids: Introducing Incredible PBX 3.1 for the $35 Raspberry Pi
http://nerdvittles.com/?p=3026
Corker,
I've been thinking about your simple requirements. I think it can be done out of the box without the need to use a full blown pbx. In order to use the POTS line the OBi110 would be needed. Since both home and office are connected with cable to the same router we can use the OBi call transfer feature with the speed dial, to call and transfer calls between two OBi units using the OBiTALK service as the speed dial number.
On the other hand, I think that a multi phone dect phone system can do everything that you may need since you mentioned voip is not that important. These multiphone systems usually have many pbx features builtin. The only problem I see is the distance between the dect phones.
The OBi solution is really for those wanting to use cheaper voip services, or bridging voip with pots.
QBZappy,
I have my Raspberry Pi sitting right here beside me on the desk. But... I had no idea you could run Asterisk on it. Who knew and didn't tell me!? >:(
Thanks for the heads up! :)
pc44
pc44,
When did you get it?
I got it just a few weeks ago... around end of August. Have played with it a little bit but didn't even think of it as a possible VoIP toy!
pc44,
This might interest you.
Raspberry Pi gets more interesting (for VoIP)
http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r27539887-Raspberry-Pi-gets-more-interesting-for-VoIP-.
Wow... that's amazing. Even has built-in Google Voice support. Amazing... except... that... I already have my OBIs !! :)
Thanks for the heads up... it certainly is interesting.