PRI on an Avaya Partner?  Yes You Can!

We recently had the fun of working on a project with a busy mortgage company that was out of space on their partner system. They were also out of contract on their telephone services, so it was a good time to consider some alternatives. When we got to talking about budgets, it was clear that they didn’t want to change the entire system out.

Can we reuse our phones on a new system? Not really.

Can we add more modules to our system to add the extra extensions? No – your system is full!

What can we do about it? Why not use an Asterisk system in front of the Avaya Partner, take in the PRI and feed out analog lines back to the Avaya?

Planning

We met with the customer and reviewed their requirements. We needed to add five phones to a system that was out of space. We needed the existing staff to be able to use their existing partner phones, to be able to transfer calls to both the old phones and the new phones, and for everyone to easily make calls. Our design that meets those goals includes a Xorcom telephony platform, Elatix (Asterisk), and Cisco 509g telephones.

Execution

We began our programming on the Elastix system by setting up the Xorcom box simply. Take incoming calls on the PRI and feed them to a hunt group that included all of the analog station ports. Program the Cisco phones to work on the Elastix and setup the new users. Define all of the outbound routes to give both the Avaya and Cisco users the ability to make outbound calls.

How does it work?

Simply put: Great! For the Avaya users it is seamless. The calls come in and go out just like they did before. Transfers to the Cisco people work very well as well. The only wrinkle was the transfer from a Cisco 509g phone to the Avaya phones; it was a two part process. The user had to initiate a transfer, dial the auto attendant on the Avaya, and then dial the extension. It was a bit painful at first, but everyone got used to it after a short while.

Conclusion

It’s clear that this is a great solution if you are looking to extend the life of your old system while expanding its capabilities. It could also easily be justified when you want to take advantage of lower rates on the PRI line to save on your monthly telephone bill. This solution also works on other analog-line based solutions. The customer ended up with a great savings on the upgrade, and a clear path to the future using VoIP without having to throw away equipment that works.