Originally Posted By: Dignan
Ooo, I like the looks of OnSIP. That's appealing.

The biggest challenge with this site is the wiring. To be honest, it's kind of a mess. There's an older building that houses the offices, and a newer one where the equipment rack is that holds the modem, router, and main switch. That connects to the older building via fiber through an underground conduit, as the offices were about 500 feet away. From there, it's pretty much a series of switches through the building, with the offices practically daisy-chained.

It's not set up the way I'd like, but I inherited some of the mess and there's not much I could do about it anyway. The old building is a horrible hodgepodge of additions and old construction, full of cinderblock walls.

The current system uses analog phones, and they all run back to a hideous mess of a phone block.

The phones in the new building would be the most difficult to replace, as those are wall-mounted and I don't even know where their lines run back to (not much institutional knowledge in this place). This whole post is to say that some of the spots in this place only have phone lines, and some of them only have CAT5.

I don't know if this information has helped at all or just confused it.
Well, somehow you need to assemble a functional plan of where you want to end up.

Analog phones can be made to work with VOIP tech. You may well need to bite the bullet on the existing old building wiring panel and restructure it into an understandable and functional form. Hopefully the newer building has some sort of wiring panel already, you just need to find it and map it out.

There may well be forgotten equipment still connected to some lines, and still in service stuff that has not yet been brought to your attention, such as fax machines in odd locations, even dial up modems or alarm system interconnects.

If the CAT5 is being used for 10 or 100 mbit Ethernet then there are 'spare' wire pairs in the cable that can carry analog phone signals. Or use the 'spare' four pairs in each CAT5 cable to create a dedicated 100m it link for VOIP service. Or run gigabit through the cable and use the bandwidth for everything.

Lots of fun to be had in bringing old infrastructure into the future, kicking and screaming.

One way to do an end run on unforgiving interior construction is to run new wiring around the outside of the building, possibly through the roof or attic, and sometimes through the air ducts (plenum rated cable).