[Help] Hardware selection confusion

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I’m almost 100% new to asterisk, and have been reading everything I can for almost a month, and I’m finally ready to start experimenting with Asterisk. There are however some things confusing me concerning hardware selction.

  1. At home I have a connection to the PSTN with a ISDN BRI, 2 wire U interface, being converted through a NT1 to a 4 wire S/T interface. I assume this is where I should cut the line and plug in an Asterisk server. From there, a line is passed to 4 phones on the same wire. Now here’s where I’m confused. Are the same interfaces and plug-in hardware used for T1/E1 (PRI) used to connect a BRI? In that case I’d need 1 FXO and 1 FXS, so a TDM11B is where my money should be put? Or is there anyway a cheap studen can use 2 X100P cards? :smile:

  2. If an office with 150 ISDN phones wanted to migrate to Asterisk without the costs of buying 150 new IP phones, what is the cheapest way to do this? I mean, obviously you can’t buy a PCI interface with 150 ports, but with 1-2 FXS lines, I suppose we have 31-62 phone lines that could be used simultaneously. Is there anybody selling some sorts of E1 -> Many E0 demux/switch?

2

Ok, I finallly realized the Digium cards only do PRI, not BRI. But all seem to cost around 400$. How can BRI cards cost more ten PRI cards? And since there is no words about FXS/FXO with BRI interfaces, I suppose they don’t have the same issue, and every BRI interface is universal, like a regular Ethernet interface?