Hotels and Asterisk
June 16, 2008 by Arthur Miller
Matthew Nickasch of NetworkWorld.com has written an interesting article about VoIP in the hotel industry.
Matthew notes (rightly) that albeit a little late, hotels are transitioning to VoIP because the cost of hardware has finally come down, and it has apparently become easier to implement changes to a large amount of extensions quickly.
At VoIP Supply, we have seen and worked on several initiatives to make deploying asterisk-based PBX’s easier to implement.
On a typical deployment we will use a Rhino Equipment FXS Channel bank, the Rhino Ceros IP PBX and Rhino Equipment Digital PCI card, along with Aastra analog phones. The magic is in the dial plan, and we can set a lot of that up ahead of time.
10 Comments
35% of our customers (www.sitofono.com) are in the travel/hospitality industry…. they got it more than others
People should read this.
Now with Pbillx on the market you can use an Asterisk based pbx and interface it with a micros pms (Fidelio, Opera etc.).
The thing is ‘Pbillx’ is NOT yet supporting full interfacing with Micros Fidelio at the moment. They told me they will be within a few weeks / months.
Interfacing for getting the call to charge is not the biggest issue maybe, but they told us the interfacing part of disconnecting the phones in the room when a guest is checked out is not working completely YET !
When someone knows anything better or has an update about these issues please let me now by email.
Thank you in advance and have a nice day!
I’m not sure whether you (Tom Dings) are aware that Pbillx is in the final stage of its certification (beta installations). Pbillx has been already successfully installed in 4 and 5 star Hotels. I’m not quite sure what you want to achieve with your comments. If you have any problems with using this software get in touch with the developer.
I checked with the builder of the software and it works great now. Sorry for the misunderstanding but i thought there were still a few missing parts but after testing it again the issues are solved completely and even MICROS is able to interface perfectly with this worderfull kind of software.
Thumbs up for the builder !!
Thank you again.
“I’m not sure whether you (Tom Dings) are aware that Pbillx is in the final stage of its certification (beta installations). Pbillx has been already successfully installed in 4 and 5 star Hotels. I’m not quite sure what you want to achieve with your comments. If you have any problems with using this software get in touch with the developer.”
No i was just waiting if the software was in the final stage already. The builder told me it was not completely functional yet. So thats why i wrote that message. But after that he told me the issues were solved and he is waiting certification. I wasnt aware it was already solved.
Just to close the loop on PBillX. They are full integrated with Xorcom PBX that uses the Elastix FreePBX. In addition, XorcomUSA has launched their own Commercially Supported Version of Asterisk called CompletePBX. Check it out at https://xorcom.com/voip-pbx-distributors-in-usa-and-canada/.
This will add powerfull features for hotels such as a software based operator panel and you can see if room extensions still have voicemail messages right from the screen so before they check out you can give the guest the opportunity to retrieve the message. Nobody beats Xorcom’s price/performance for FXS ports with our 32 port FXS Astribank in a 1U unit. And the FXS ports drives the message waiting light on analog phones as well.
CompletePBX also provides great call center software called ccQstats for Hotel reservation centers. This is a killer Hotel Package between Xorcom CompletePBX and PBillX!!!!!
Bill seems to be just everywhere
LOL
Just wanted to say HI
When you are serious about Asterisk…you install Xorcom.
I would like to communicate with any who have the Xorcom product installed in a hotel, using call center software.