Cisco CME and TOA 8000 Paging Setup

This year it seems that we have had a lot of equipment failures do to power outages.

This has been hard on the older paging equipment in our schools resulting in the need for new equipment.

We approached our audio experts for a solution that was network accessible and would still work with a Cisco CME based phone system if one was installed at that location at a later time.

Their solution was a TOA 8000 system which can be controlled and monitored over the network.

Unlike the previous TOA 9000 and Bogen PCM units that connected using an FXS port, the TOA 8000 requires different hardware.

The FXO port (same hardware that we use to connect to our telco provider phone lines) on the Cisco CME 2921 connects into the NL-8000AL interface unit.  The Cisco paging dial peers only required a port change and no changes were made to the Singlewire LPI software configuration we had set up for the Bogen equipment. (see previous post)

We found the TOA 8000 required a setting of a 1 second delay before paging.  If the delay was set to zero, the generated DTMF tones could be heard over the speakers on random occasions.