I manage a large private estate. We need to upgrade the phone system. The house is 20,000 square feet total. On 65 acres in rural southern Ca.
We need 20 stations. Wireless would be perferred. We need roaming communication on the 65 acres. There is a gated entrance 1600 ft from the main house that needs to be connected to the phone system to speak to the person at the gate and allow access. Also have another set of buildings that are 1000 ft from the house.
We are considering Voip vs Telco connection.
Any and all suggestions are welcome. Thanks

We just installed a Panasonic KXTDA-200 in an estate home in San Antonio, TX. We have 20 wired stations, 25 wireless, door phones with cameras, and 2 gates. this is a 37,000 sq. ft. home. Everything works great. This system will also do VOIP, but we are not deploying it in this system. VOIP has it's own set of problems.

I agree with RDS. It's hard to beat a Panasonic system for residential applications. That's all we use in these installations because of their strong wireless phone offerings. The KX-T family of systems have been sold and serviced by my company for almost 20 years with very few failures except for lightning damage. That would happen with any system, though.

Just make sure the wiring to any remote buildings is done correctly with plenty of primary AND secondary protection devices!

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Ed
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How come there's always enough time to go back and fix it a second time?

[This message has been edited by ev607797 (edited May 26, 2005).]

You are absolutely correct about the line (CO) protection and station protection. That is about the only failures we have ever had. We had a system about 90 miles from San Antonio on top of a mountain. the lightening blew up two systems, with Ditek surge protection and it was properly grounded, but in all our other high exposure accounts (to lightening) we have had no problems.

What is your current system? I'm in Temecula. You can check my profile if you would like to contact me.

Thanks,
Stuart

South Western Freedom phone. FS246 KSU

How about an Avaya phone system? They do offer wireless capability. I have installed a few systems with the wireless phone and can say that they are very user friendly. It is pretty much a full feature phone with the wireless phone. I am not sure of the range, as you say you would need quite a bit of range on the property you have.

I would like to see what kind of prices you are looking at, because pretty much any phone system you look at could probably do what you are wanting it to do with analog ports. In our house we have about 17 stations with two corldless phones and a door phone. Right now we are using a new Comdial system so I can learn the phone system. Before this, we had a Samsung system. Both system's are great. The Comdial systems offer so much for such a little price however they can get complicated to program whenever you are working with their voicemail.

Bottom line it all comes down to almost who has thebest deal and what is the most user friendly phone system. Personally I would say go with a Samsung phone system. They are great bullet proof systems with a great warranty.

Edit: The Samsung system, whether you go with a iDCS100 or an iDCS500 will both be fully VoIP capable. The Avaya system also provides contact closure feature to open and close the gate to the person you are talking to.

[This message has been edited by SooprmanX (edited May 28, 2005).]

Searchman,

Research and find a system with features that would fit your needs. I would also suggest a system with analog ports that you can put wireless phones and the door box/door strike on. Using non-propriety wireless phones will give you greater flexibility for any future changes. And you will not be limited to the wireless products that are compatible to the particular phone system you choose.

The topography and building locations will determine the wireless system that would best fit your coverage needs. If the system location is in a corner, or in the center of the property will determine the actual range the wireless systems will need to cover.

We are currently doing a ranch, not sure of the acreage, but have several single line phones in GAI-Tronics boxes, and Paging Speakers using UPAM's as "Centrex" paging adapters off of Single Line ports. We are using a Magix because of the capability of 008-OPT cards, which will drive a single line phone 18,000 feet. Wireless solutions are great, but sometimes you have to become a radio engineer to place the base stations and get proper coverage - something that I hate to support when the customer has a problem.