Experiences with Asterisk at the University of West Hungary, Sopron
Németh Tamás
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Nyugat-magyarországi Egyetem
Asterisk PBX was deployed in late 2012 at our Sopron campus. Our former PBX served numerous analog (POTS) and proprietary IP (Unistim) lines along with some digital phones. The aim of this Asterisk installation was not to replace but to complement the existing PBX by supplying new open standard (SIP) lines to our new buildings. The older PBX was connected to Telecom and NIIF VoIP via E1 interfaces and it made call routing decisions by itself. In the new setup, basic routing decisions are made by a Cisco AS5350 gateway. This gateway has a total of five E1 connections towards the Telecom, NIIF VoIP and the old PBX, but it maintains pure SIP communication with Asterisk. This layout enables Asterisk to run without using E1 or any other special line cards, installed on a virtual server. Because of the complexity of this system and the lack of experiences we decided to have the deployment performed by a professional system integrator.
We took over the management tasks meanwhile, and carried out some significant optimization steps. We proposed to make Asterisk capable of perfectly supporting surplus proprietary phone devices of the previous PBX system, and to build a softphone system upon it. This softphone system was implemented using free and multi-platform applications, providing a simple and friendly user interface, reliable and secure operation even in the strictest firewall and NAT environment. My presentaion mainly aims to discuss the technical details of the solution of the mentioned proposals.