Cordless phones over your wireless network

I work in a manufacturing plant that uses cordless phones to communicate. These are older models that are not made anymore and all testing to date shows nothing is able to replace the range inside these steel walled buildings.

Question- Our facility has wireless access points all over the place for wireless networking of our computer equipment. Is there a phone or phone system that can communicate directly with these access points, the signal go to the router, and somehow extracted/converted to go to our Avaya Definity switch?

Reply to
smaye
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You should contact your vendor and visit:

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The short answer appears to be yes, they do have a solution for you. But contact your Avaya vendor for specifics of what you desire and what they can deliver. But based on the website they do indeed handle telephone over TCP/IP.

fundamentalism, fundamentally wrong.

Reply to
Rico

"smaye" hath wroth:

You could go the Avaya route: What is the difference between IP Telephony and VoIP?

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that seems to be proprietary.

If maintaining the existing switch is a requirement, then you're stuck with their scheme and products. Reading between the acronyms, it appears to be an ordinary SIP phone. You might wanna just try an

802.11 SIP phone and see if it can be configured and used.

However, if you get a non-proprietary phone system, such as those that are Asterisk based:

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use anyone's wireless VoIP phones such as the almost just released:
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're not stuck with a proprietary solution.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

Hi Jeff,

Bottom line is I got a quote from AVAYA at $14K. Although I am sure it would work great it seemed high and also appeared to be recreating a wireless network that we already have installed for data. It would be almost impossible to justify the cost.

My thinking is this. We currently have standard cordless analog phones. they are connected to the switch on analog ports. My thought was that if we had a phone that could be picked up and understood by our wireless access points we could bring the signal out at the router (somehow) and send this to these analog ports.

I got the idea from looking at my VOIP phone at home. If I had a cordless phone that could communicate to my wireless router, the VOIP adapter is on one of it's ports. The output of this adapter is plugged in to my wall phone jack. Couldn't this output just plug in to my analog ports on my PBX switch?

This stuff may be second nature to all of you. I just am new to it. Are there phones out there designed to communicate through an existing wireless network?

Reply to
smaye

Hi Jeff,

Bottom line is I got a quote from AVAYA at $14K. Although I am sure it would work great it seemed high and also appeared to be recreating a wireless network that we already have installed for data. It would be almost impossible to justify the cost.

My thinking is this. We currently have standard cordless analog phones. they are connected to the switch on analog ports. My thought was that if we had a phone that could be picked up and understood by our wireless access points we could bring the signal out at the router (somehow) and send this to these analog ports.

I got the idea from looking at my VOIP phone at home. If I had a cordless phone that could communicate to my wireless router, the VOIP adapter is on one of it's ports. The output of this adapter is plugged in to my wall phone jack. Couldn't this output just plug in to my analog ports on my PBX switch?

This stuff may be second nature to all of you. I just am new to it. Are there phones out there designed to communicate through an existing wireless network?

Reply to
smaye

Hi Jeff,

Bottom line is I got a quote from AVAYA at $14K. Although I am sure it would work great it seemed high and also appeared to be recreating a wireless network that we already have installed for data. It would be almost impossible to justify the cost.

My thinking is this. We currently have standard cordless analog phones. they are connected to the switch on analog ports. My thought was that if we had a phone that could be picked up and understood by our wireless access points we could bring the signal out at the router (somehow) and send this to these analog ports.

I got the idea from looking at my VOIP phone at home. If I had a cordless phone that could communicate to my wireless router, the VOIP adapter is on one of it's ports. The output of this adapter is plugged in to my wall phone jack. Couldn't this output just plug in to my analog ports on my PBX switch?

This stuff may be second nature to all of you. I just am new to it. Are there phones out there designed to communicate through an existing wireless network?

Reply to
smaye

Jeff,

I tried your last link and it did not go anywhere for me. I don't think I want or need anything proprietary.

I don't quite understand the asterisk based link. Just what is it?

Reply to
smaye

"smaye" hath wroth:

Ouch. However, commodity VoIP phones are currently $200-$250/ea. That's still fairly expensive.

If the Avaya wireless also works on 2.4Ghz, you will have an interfernce problem with your existing network.

Yeah, but that's not taking advantage of digital audio (VoIP). Once you have a digital version of the audio, there's no sane reason to convert it back to analog until it his the caller at the other end. For example, the Asterisk based switch never converts anything to analog. It goes via a T1 to some IP telephony gateway service provider which dumps it into the PSTN (public switched telephone network). Think digital, not analog.

Again, you're thinking analog. You VoIP phone at home is digital all the way to Vonage or whomever you're using. You could plug an analog cordless phone into it's phone jack. You could also eliminate the VoIP box completely and have it in the VoIP 802.11 phone. That's what I think you need or want. The benifit is that it uses your existing IP network.

Yes, but as I previously mumbled, it's silly to do that. Go digital all the way to the PSTN.

Actually no. Wireless VoIP is a new technology with new products and proposed standards just coming out. I expect it to be popular because people can use them to make free phone calls via public Wi-Fi hot spots and not pay the cellular providers. You would be doing the same thing, except you already have a Wi-Fi network on which it runs.

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Light reading:

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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

"smaye" hath wroth:

I assure you that my link is not proprietary. It probably wrapped in your news reader. Try again, it works.

Did you read through the web pile and follow the links? It's an open source IP telephony switch intended to replace or suppliment your existing Avaya switch. Methinks you should read about the basics of IP telephony before you start asking for quotations. It's not easy.

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Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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makes some POTS->VOIP and VOIP->POTS boxes, if you just want to use your network for phone transport...

Reply to
William P.N. Smith

I'm a tad confused about SIP phones, do they need a "PBX"-like box on the LAN somewhere (like Asterix), or a "provider" out there in the network cloud, or will they somehow make phone calls (to other SIP Phones or POTS phones?) all by themselves?

Thanks!

Reply to
William P.N. Smith

OK Jeff,

I have had time to understand your responses better. Yes, in my facility I am confined to using the AVAYA Definity switch. So, using open source code such as Asterisk is out. You mention buying a 802.11g SIP phone and see if it can be configured. I assume you mean configured to talk directly to the Definity switch? I guess that makes sense because most of our desk phones are digital. Probably just need to understand what protocol(?) the digital desk phones use and see if it can be replicated on the WiFi SIP phone I select to try? I like the linksys model you linked for me. Do you know of a forum or website that may have knowledge on configuring a phone like this to my switch. This is really not my field.

In closing, yes the phone costs you mention are a little high, but in comparison to my alternative of everyone carrying cell phones this is still reasonable. Our sister plant uses cell phones for this need. Their monthly bill is >$800. I can quickly pay off a SIP phone.

Reply to
smaye

"smaye" hath wroth:

Oh well.

Yes. My guess(tm) is that the phones are standard SIP VoIP phones. The only proporietary aspect might be the SIP setup. However, I'm beginning to have 2nd thoughts about this approach. If there were non-Avaya phones that could be used, Google should find 3rd party phones for sale that claim Difinity compatibility. I couldn't find any.

Yep.

It was just released this week.

No, not really. Also not my field. I do wireless. Google found a few useful Avaya Difinity forums and blogs:

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various Avaya groups on Yahoo look interesting:
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Ouch. I see the problem. Good luck and I hope you can make the phone work. If not, the VoIP Wi-Fi phones could always terminate the call locally in some kind of a VoIP to analog converter (server) which then interfaces into the Definity switch with (yuck) analog.

These are 2 port servers, but they should be fine for testing:

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Good luck and I hope it works for you.

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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