Using Nortel i2000 phones with PlugPBX

If you're looking to add some IP deskphones to Asterisk, Nortel i2000 series phones are pretty cheap and easy to find on ebay. The most popular one is the i2004. These phones are very nicely built and have excellent speakerphones.

These phones talk IP but don't use SIP. They use the UNISTIM protocol which is bundled with Asterisk 1.6.2.6. The only problem is that there is a bug in chan_unistim.c which causes problems on the ARM processor.

Besides fixing the bug, I merged support for the i2002 phone (which has less display lines) and I merged a small change so that the timer displays in English instead of French.

FYI, I'm running Asterisk on a dockstar which was built and installed according to the forum posts.

To apply my changes to your local system, you need to drop the attached file into the /usr/src/asterisk-1.6.2.6/channels directory. Next, cd up to the root directory and make. Next copy channels/chan_unistim.so to /usr/lib/asterisk/modules. Restart Asterisk and you're good to go.

There are a bunch of web pages which describe how to configure the phones for Asterisk. Also, there are some limitations to what these phones can do with Asterisk. For example, single line. I believe that there will be a few changes to Asterisk 1.8 which will add more features to these phones.