Hey all-
I’m trying to figure out the exact or at least ‘close to’ costs of configuring my office with VOIP service, asterisk, and phones for around 20 people.
We’ll need a T1 for local calls, as well as a T1 for long distance calls. (We have these already)
I’m looking at specific costs- The T1 cards that i’ll need- Do you guys have any suggestions on what works well with Asterisk? What type of IP phones do you reccommend?
does the O’reilly book cover a majority of these points as far as business class configuration and setup?
We need to run a confrence bridge for about 8 people maximum, i remember seeing that this is possible, but i just was looking for some clarification.
Has anyone else set up their office this way?
To rephrase,
I’m wanting to make sure that i can use a Local T1 for local calls, and then a Long Distance T1 strictly for long distance calls- Something for a SMB for around 20 users, they all need to work together with asterisk.
Is this at all possible? Could someone point me in the right direction?
you’d need a two span T1 card, which i believe digium makes, but i’d just bump up to the quad-span - that way you have the room should you need it.
card details here: digium.com/en/products/hardware/te411p.php
for your server, you’d need something fairly hefty, but a fast desktop would probably even work…we use dell 2850’s for 20-50 user loads, and most of the time, they don’t go above 10% CPU usage…we have a dialer box that has 10 concurrent users on it and it averages around 50% CPU - it’s a P4 3.0 w/ 1GB of RAM…conferencing needs a bit more horsepower, but a lower end server would probably fit the bill nicely.
for most of our agents, we use counterpath’s eyebeam softphone, and managers/executives use polycom 501’s. you could also look at using an ATA (analog telephone adapter) that would interface between your existing phones and the asterisk server (via a network connection).
if you haven’t read it, Asterisk, the Future of Telephony is a great read - there is a free version in PDF form out there - google it.
good luck!
The digium card, the quad one, would that be able to handle 2 or 3 lines (faxes, mostly) of analogue service, or would it all be VoIP on that card?
Thanks for the shove in the right direction. I just grabbed the PDF and i’m reading it now. If i have any sincere questions i’ll make sure the answers aren’t in the book
Appricate it.
we use ATA’s for our faxes - just an analog adapter that converts the standard POTS signal into VOIP - these work great.
if you needed more than a couple analog lines, you could buy a separate card (like the TDM400 series) with up to four modules…or a wildcard, which has 24 channels…but for the most part, ATAs are cheap and easy to use…they work wonderfully for our fax machines (we have around a dozen total).