Professional Office in Boston

From SIPfoundry sipXecs IP PBX, The Open Source SIP PBX for Linux - Calivia

Deployment of sipX in a Small Professional Office

# of Lines: 18 HW: HP 1U Server, 2.4 GHz, Raid 1 disk 36GB, 1GB RAM Phones: Polycom GW: Audiocodes Firewall: Cisco Pix and Ingate SIParator

We decided to upgrade our phone system mainly because we wanted new phones. Our existing Comdial phones were really bad speaker phones and some of our partners started to have Polycom conference phones on their desks in addition to a regular phone. In addition we were attracted by some of the new features an IP phone system would give you such as a softphone on our laptops, voicemail forwarding by email and click-2-dial. And of course we wanted to save long distance charges.

The following highlights characterize our deployment:

• PSTN connection: We have a full T1 from Focal that terminates on a TP-260 from Audiocodes. We chose the TP-260 because we wanted a high quality gateway but were not willing to pay the extra price for a standalone unit. The TP-260 only gets power from the host system as it has its own Ethernet interface that connects into our network.
• FAX: Our FAX line has a DID number that is part of the range we get from Focal. Therefore, FAX calls come in to the TP-260 gateway and get routed over our internal LAN to a MP-102 FXS Audiocodes gateway. That setup has worked great for us once we got the two gateways configured right.
• URL Calling: We chose an Ingate SIParator to be configured in parallel with our existing Cisco Pix firewall. On the external DNS server we configured DNS SRV records for SIP so that SIP calls from the Internet get routed to the external interface of the Ingate box. On the internal LAN sipX uses the Ingate as its default gateway.
• POE: All our Polycom phones are powered over Ethernet using the Cisco Catalyst switch we already had.
• Softphones: We deployed Counterpath eyeBeam softphones on all our laptops. That allows remote usage of the phone system using a headset.
• Click-to-Dial: We are now in the process of rolling out click-2-dial using SIP TAPI.

The sipX system has now been in production for two months without any issues. The biggest problem during installation was the configuration of the Audiocodes gateways (both T1 and FXS).