Elastix for a Taxi Firm in Australia

[mdkberry1]

Hi

I am about to pitch to a small taxi firm in Australia for a total system revamp. I want to use Elastix as their call system. They are in the country not city, and service about 7 cars when busy.

One issue is that during busy times (Weekends) all calls go to the owners house and he routes the jobs to the cars via CB radio, the rest of the time, when he isnt at home, all calls route to the cars and are picked up by the drivers themselves. Currently this is over CB radio and doesnt work very well. All drivers hear all phone calls, and for the caller it is difficult to communicate through a phone and cb radio.

ideally I want to host the asterisk system on a VPS in a host data centre, not at the owners house for fail safe reasons. but I can look at either method. And I want to suggest using iphones, ipads or some kind of device like them in the cars. this will be for the call dispatch system as well. I have tested Bria on iphone with Asterisk, but I have reservations. Does anyone know of a system of this nature working well anywhere?

I have two big questions (thousands actually, but two for now relating to Asterisk)

Firstly, how can I connect a VPS based Asterisk system to the analog PSTN line in the managers house. do I need a second computer with PSTN connection and asterisk loaded to literally route straight over the internet to the VPS asterisk box.

and does anyone have any cunning suggestions for ways to look at this scenario and add in failsafe measures for days when the ISP goes down, which it does in residential country locations in Australia sometimes for a couple of days unfortunately

I would really like to connect with anyone who has experience of Asterisk and Taxi companies esp in Australia but elsewhere also.

please mail me [email protected]

rgds
Mark

 

[Amphibian]

mdkberry,

How did you come out on your pitch to the customer. What solutions did you arrive at?

I'm sorry that I am just now seeing this, but if you are still needing some info I may be able to suggest some.

Thanks

Amphibian

 

[mdkberry1]

Ended up not happening, which to be honest I am kind of glad about. It was going to be a nightmare to provide a realistic solution that would work well

I did find some interesting solutions that might have helped. one is iPTT which is a walkie talkie app for the iPhone/iPad which seems to mainly be used by people for ranting foreign politics to anyone who will listen, but you can create private channels and I was looking at using that to provide mobile comms between cars, then add something like a Bria softphone on the PDA too for answering inbound calls to the Elastix PBX form within the cars. The theory was all good, and there are a couple of companies in the US I spoke to who use iPads in their cars and a similar idea, but I think the reality is it would have been a nightmare to support and get working well. Also the client was all about cutting costs which is not the best way to make a system like this come together, you need someone willing to go all out on it.