[sf-lug] Fwd: [school-discuss] Voice over IP for schools--VoIP Use Case

[jim stockford]

Begin forwarded message:

> To: schoolforge-discuss at schoolforge.net
> Subject: [school-discuss] Voice over IP for schools
> Reply-To: schoolforge-discuss at schoolforge.net
>
> Folks, we may get to experiment with VOIP at Brandon sooner than I 
> thought!  Here's what I was thinking: we want to be able to do local 
> calls to all student homes, some of which don't have PCs and/or 
> broadband, so that rules out Skype or the open source stuff I think. 
> For example, one telephone application I've seen effectively used in 
> other elementary schools is to have students call their parents from 
> the classroom when they didn't do their homework, etc.  Another 
> application is to have conference calls with Nasa experts during their 
> lunch (I think it was Nasa that had that program), or conceivably 
> parents could give talks from work during their lunch time.  And 
> conference calls with French schools would be fun for our kids.
>
> Since we have phone lines run to each room, I'm thinking a Vonage box 
> with 3 lines (about $100/month) or three VOIP lines from our cable 
> provider (we already have a cable modem in the school) and a low cost 
> PBX.  And assuming the phone lines have all four wires connected, 
> teachers could also use the fax capability built into some of their 
> printers (hmmm, would homework still be late if it was faxed to the 
> room <grin>).
>
> We'll need a PBX into which we can plug 40 or so lines, the Asterix 
> open source PBX would run over $4000 for two of their 24 port cards, 
> not counting the price of the Linux PC used as the PBX, has anyone 
> tried this with Asterix?  Any other ideas?
>
> Regards,
> Georgia Open Source Education Foundation
>
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