Help Needed!

hi … em a biginer … i need some help relatin to hardware … that what h/ws should be needed to build an asterisk system supporting 5 concurrent calls … i will be very grateful thankss

I assume you are referring to analog lines. In that case your would need a TDM04B and TDM01B.

You are not limited to pots lines. You can also go with voip (which tends to be a lot cheaper). For 5 concurent calls any old machine should work (p3 500 mhz with 256 megs of ram).

as they’ve started to say, it depends on how you have the calls going. it also depends on what kind of phones you have.

The best (IMHO) way and also the cheapest is with a VoIP provider and IP phones (grandstream, snom, aastra, polycom, cisco, etc). With this you do not need additional hardware, just a VoIP account that supports BYOD (aka it isn’t locked to one of those vonage type adapters) and your phones. Then you can support as many calls as your provider or employees can handle.

If you have analog phone lines you need one FXO port for each line. Each line can handle one conversation (channel). If you need 5 channels, you need 5 ports; thus do what Angler said, you need at least two TDM400 boards spec’d with FXO ports.

However if you don’t buy IP phones and you want to use your existing phones, you need * to talk to them somehow. System phones from an old PBX generally won’t just plug into Asterisk. If you use normal ‘dumb’ analog phones, each one needs an FXS port. These can be configured on TDM400 cards by adding FXS modules (green). Remember each card only supports 4 ports- so if you need 5 in and 5 out you might consider their larger (and of course more expensive) TDM2400 card which supports up to 24 ports.
FXS ports can also be added with ATAs (analog telephony adapter, ie the vonage box type thing, it is a SIP to FXS converter box). The ATA registers to * via SIP and provides one or two FXS ports. These can often be cheaper than real FXS ports, although they are a bit harder to configure as you must setup SIP on * and the ATA.

If you get IP phones check out SNOM or AAstra. Both are great quality and recommend for * use. Grandstream is good too if you’re on a budget. Cisco phones are nice but can be (from what I hear) a real pain to configure or upgrade; plus you must pay more to get documentation or upgrade firmware. Polycom are also good quality but you have to become a ‘certified polycom technician’ to get access to the firmware at all.

Hope that helps!