Obi for 2-Line Small Business: 2 Obi's - 2 Lines?

[RickG]

Is it possible to use two Obi 110s to replace a two line
small business phone set up?

At our church office, we have two independent phone lines with distinct phone numbers coming in from our local telecom provider century link. Those two lines are brought into a closet and then hardwired (no PBX device?) to connect to 6 phones on the church campus.  4 of the phones on campus only receive one line, however, the pastor and secretary's phones receive two lines somehow through a single wall jack in each office.  

The desk phone of the secretary and the desk phone of the pastor -  (each phone supports up to four lines although we only use two) - are able to:

1) switch between the two lines
2) call out and receive calls on either line
3) transfer calls from secretary to pastor and vice versa
4) conference call and hold calls

In addition, the secretary can be on an outgoing call from one line while the pastor is on a different outgoing call on the other line. Likewise, they can both be on separate incoming calls on different lines at the same time as well.  And I believe that we can conference those two independent lines together with their phones too.

Is it possible for us to replicate this system – a basic two-line small business office system – with either one Obi110 or two Obi110s tied into a single network router?  Or alternatively would it be possible to replicate this set using two Obi110's on two separate network routers from two different providers - Comcast and Centurylink - one Obi on each independent network router?  Another organization on campus has internet service through a different provider than the church and would be willing to let us use their network router if need be.  (We would prefer to use only our network router if possible.)

Ideally, we would like to simply replace each independent incoming phone line from our telecom provider with a single Gmail voice line through a single Obi and plug those lines into our current hardwired phone system.  

Our hope would be that this would allow the secretary and pastors phone to function as they currently do (see list above) but when they select the line 1 on their phone it would now be a Gmail voice line through one of the Obi's and when they select the line 2 on their phone it would be the other Gmail voice line through the other Obi.

I have spent 6 hours or more looking through the forums and internet to see if this kind of set up can be managed using one or two Obi's on one or two independent network routers and I could not find a conclusive answer.

Thanks so much for any help.

[Judgeless]

You are making it a lot more complicated than it needs to be. If you buy two OBI100's you can replace both your current land lines.  In the wire closet disconnect both land lines from the phone company and plug them into each of the OBI100's.  Everything will work as it has been working in the past without the phone bills.

Addition:  You can put as many OBI100 on a single network router as you want.  If you wanted to put each OBI100 on a different network you can but you do not have to.

[Stewart]

There is no problem connecting two OBi devices to the same Internet router.  However, I see a few possible issues:

Foremost is emergency calling.  Google Voice does not offer 911 service.  You can configure the OBi with a secondary provider, e.g. Callcentric or Anveo, which would be used for 911 and also serve as a backup.  However, the system will still be less reliable than a landline; a failure of power, equipment, Internet service or provider will prevent it from working.  Possibly, you will want to keep one basic measured landline.  The OBi110 can be configured so 911 calls would use the landline; in a power failure, the phones would be automatically connected directly to the landline.

In your existing system, although the two lines have different numbers, they may be set up for hunting, sometimes called "in rotary", which means that if the main published number is busy, an incoming call rings the second line.  If you have that feature and want to keep it with the new system, be aware that GV does not offer hunting.  It's possible to configure two OBi devices to do that, but I'm not sure that it would be friendly to your existing phones.

A few multiline phones have hum or noise when connected to two different VoIP devices.  There may be no easy way to tell whether your models will have this trouble, or whether it would be loud enough to be objectionable, other than trying it.

I would not trust my business to Google Voice.  Although it's a very reliable service, there is essentially no support, so if something did go wrong it could take a long time to get it resolved.  I'd seriously consider a quality paid provider -- you can still achieve considerable savings over CenturyLink.