I dont know if i am right here but I hope someone can give me an answer. My company would like to set up a daily updated information line which people can call and hear a recorded message. the system does not need to be able to record messages from the callers, simply play the message and hang up. All telecom folks i spoke to give me different answers which confuses me. So i came here in hopes to get a straight answer to:
Whats the best way to set a information line up? VoIP?
Whats the best way to handle a high volume of calls at the same time?
Is it possible to run the entire thing from a residential VoIP line and handle incoming calls with a call attendant software(cheap)?
I assume you are trying to set up an announcement for outages, news, school closings, whatever that sort of thing. This is really, REALLY easy to do with Asterisk.
First you need telco links into Asterisk. I think the easiest way to do this would be with VoIP, using a wholesale company like Voicepulse Connect (connect.voicepulse.com) you can pay $11/mo for a DID (phone number) and get up to 4 incoming calls (more if you pay extra)… that will satisfy that need.
HOWEVER
with any VoIP setup, you must ensure that you have the bandwidth to handle it. Your VoIP service will only be as good as the internet pipe it runs on. You NEED qos controls on your wan link to prioritize VoIP data. Also consider how much bandwidth each call will use with overhead- 64k ulaw becomes 80k with overhead… you can use compressed codecs like gsm or G.729 though.
You could run the entire thing with VoIP lines, although I’d recommend against residential lines. Asterisk can be used to set up an auto attendant or just play the recording and hang up, however you want it. This will be quite cheap- you only pay for the PC it runs on and the service.
If you say a lot of concurrant calls, how many are we talking about?