As some of you may know, I'm working in Paris at the moment installing a big broadcast / IT production system in a mahoosive building. :eek:

We're getting close to the testing stage and we are going to be in situations where it would be well handy to be able to talk to each other without having to resort to mobile phones ( = expensive when we're all roaming abroad!).

We have installed a large network of Cisco Catalyst switches which are exlusively on an intranet with no external / WWW access.

And so I wondered about having a temporary VoIP system. I guess we could use our PCs for voice comms using some free software, but not sure what would be best. Remember we can't use any normal www services such as Skype, MSN, Yahoo or googletalk as we have no internet access.

So, what kind of free solutions are out there? Can it be just point to point without any kind of server running as a kind of PBX or would a server-based system be really helpful (we have a second domain controller begging for a bit of a workout :P) What would be really good is if it were to adhere to a "standard" so that it's not dependant on Windows OS - I'm thinking of Cisco IP phones which we could get or other. Am I dreaming or is this relatively easy to achieve in terms of cost of hardware and time setting up / ease of setting up ? :confused:

edit: What would be really cool is if we could get some cheap 802.11 wireless VoIP phones and get a couple of wireless access points at the various satellite areas where we'll be working

It's a totally unknown field to me and a bit of a minefield as to where to start, so any pointers would be appreciated

Erm , walkie talkies?

Failing that you can use netmeeting if you have XP clients and a windoze server that can run the ILS component of IIS.

Cisco IP phones would need a callmanger server to provide any functionality for your phones which won't be cheap.

There are free SIP clients and servers that you can look at though I have no idea how good any of them are. They would work just fine on a LAN with no internet though.

List of SIP software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

We did think of walkie talkies, but fancied something a bit sexier

Going down the SIP route is probably overkill for simple comms, might have a look at netmeeting...

Cheers

I seem to remember we played with SIP Express Router a few years ago and that should work fine for what you are after.

For free anyway....

Asterisk :: The Open Source Telephony Platform | - have used this before when at uni.

Another vote for Asterisk here, asterisk on a server and a SIP client on your laptop. If the building has Wi-Fi you could install a SIP Client on a Wi-Fi PDA and have mobile comms.

if you had a decent mobile (N95) you could use something like truphone which a SIP client that intergrates with the phone... SIP-SIP calls are free..

failing that i think microsoft do a trial version of Live Communications server as a VM which is the "new" netmeeting platform