atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems NEC Telephones & Systems Connecting 3 IPK Elite boxes so all three offices act as 1 location

Looks like p2ii is correct that you can install a PVA as a 8 or 16 port Megaco card in a IPK1 system. The card is configured in the IPK as a ESI8 or ESIB16 card. No mention of it being used as any form of trunk card..

Are your 3 buildings together at one site??
If so, you might want to atleast consider installing copper pairs. We ended up installing 1000ft of 100-pair between two buildings. The cost was comparable, to the other options, but the option comes without all of possible problems
that the other options risks. I have a good clean install, buried underground, with excellent quality. My longest cable run is over 1600 ft. (we have two huge buildings.)

If these 3 buildings are on the same campus, you can run them all of off one IPK I KSU if you can get tie cables runback to the main building. Otherwise,I would recommend going with the PVA cards & set up CCISoIP. This is easy to do & works great.

Have you considered the monthly cost of 3 point to point T1s. If you can not run copper pair to the other sites you might be better off going with Centrex VoiP or a VoiP system

Hello Friends... I'm sorry for resurecting an old post, but I don't feel as though I succesfully closed this thread out for any future users who want an answer to this same question later... so here is the final status of this.

Three Site VPN, with NEC IPK Elite IPK II

You don't need a T1 to do VPN's for phones. :read: I had to configure 84-05 with the internal IP Address of the current box and 50-03 with the internal IP Address of the remote boxes. I'm sure that's not everything that we did, as he created F-Routes and virtual ports and extentions for extra-building transfers and updating of extention-in-use lights between buildings. But those were the basic setup items and I'm up and running.

We have occational problems with the VOIP going down, while the VPN is still up and active and I have to press the reset button on the VOIP card in the affected building. We also had an inital bug with the first install because there was a service pack that contained a flaw which crashed the VOIP card after 4 and a half or five minutes of conversation. Upgrading to the proper pack fixed that... but we still loose it from time to time. My installer is still working on that...

But my conclusion is that I do not need to spend $1600 a month for T1 lines in all three buildings. FIOS is cheaper ($100 / month / location for static IP's... so $300 total rather than $1600), faster and better than small, limited bandwidth channels. The routers we have are capabile of class of service and quality of service, however with 5mb Download and 1.5 MB / second upload speeds, we haven't found the need to configure this. Occationally, we hear echo in our conversations, but I hear you get that on a T-1 connection too. But contrary to Ken's initial response, My experience says to me, that Yes, it really actually is, just as simple as "jumping into the Internet cloud" and then "just popping out" at the other end. To quote the loud booming voice from a PBS show I watched as a child...

"I CANnnnn... BE DONEnnnnn!"

Thanks everyone for your help!!

If I wanted to do further experimentation , I'd take down the VPN... Do a little network sniffing to see what ports I'm using and then setup the Routers with port forwarding on those ports. Then I'd go into 84-05 and 50-03 and change the interal IP addresses to the outside static IP's of my FIOS connections to see if it would work without the VPN. I'd venture to say that it would, but I haven't tried it yet... (If it aint broke, don't fix it).

CARD SETUP...
ESIB (16) running IPK II
COID (4)
COID (4)
CCISoIP(24)