Business Phone System Installation Scenarios

Large Business Example

This scenario examines a business with 1,500 employees.  The main office is in New York.  District offices are in Chicago and Los Angeles. Support is done at the Denver office.

• Asterisk servers are in separate hosted facilities in New York and Chicago.  The Asterisk servers communicate with each other over a high speed Internet connection.  Various Asterisk servers are needed to support this many users. The Asterisk servers communicate with each other, and each of the branch offices, over a high speed Internet connection.   The hosted facilities are hardened, and geographically separate from each other and the company offices.
  
  
  
• With shared Asterisk servers, if one fails another takes over.  This is much safer for the company, since there is no single point of failure. Even in the event of an outage at one of the main offices, telephone communications won’t be disrupted.
  
  
  
• If there is a problem in the office, employees can take their phones off their desks, and move them to their homes or another office.  If there is a problem at the Chicago office, key employees can reloate to the New York office, taking their desk phones with them, or using phones already at the New York office.  Business goes on.
  
  
  
• Users seeking support can call local numbers in any of the regions.  These calls are routed to the support center in Denver.  The calls are sent over the internet, so there is no long distance charge to the company.  The user has called a local number, and has no long distance charge — toll bypass.
  
  
  
• With Asterisk, you can make calls through the telephone company (PSTN), or makes calls over the Internet.  With the appropriate hardware, Asterisk supports telephony over the PSTN, without any Internet connection.  It is much cheaper to send telephone calls over the Internet than through the telephone company.  Asterisk can pay for itself with the money you save on phone bills.