Ideal Asterisk Environment

I’ve been poking around voip-info for a little while and I’m still trying to find what the ideal Asterisk solution would be.

  • What phones work the best with Asterisks while providing the most functionality from the Asterisk software?
  • Hardware cards for the server?
  • What’s the best SIP phone out there?
  • What protocol will provide the best quality of service?
  • What about redundancy if something may fail? How many lines per computer?
  • Is O/S really matter? I like BSD operating systems but what about up-to-date drivers and functionalities for Asterisk on a BSD system?

Any advice is appreciated.

[quote=“fiber0pti”]* What protocol will provide the best quality of service?
[/quote]
Protocol shouldn’t matter - what will make a difference to quality is network bandwidth and the codec used.

You can probably get asterisk to work on different O/Ss, but it’s likely to be better tested and debugged under linux - and support will be much more forthcoming.

What codecs will make a difference? Are there any descriptive pages that tell the differences between the supported codecs? Pros, cons, etc…

You will find a vast amount of information on all aspects of VOIP, including codecs, at:

voip-info.org/tiki-index.php

and on asterisk specifically at:

voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Asterisk

I’m a newbie myself, but I recommend first timers to use the following…

Asterisk@home (just burn it on cd and installs everything by itself)
Digium TDM400 with at least one 100M module (for your landline)
Aastra Voip phone or
Granstream ATA’s with analog phones
A good VOIP company that lets you use softphone

These are what the professionals recommended to me, hope this helps!

Regards,
Tabo

[quote=“fiber0pti”]I’ve been poking around voip-info for a little while and I’m still trying to find what the ideal Asterisk solution would be.

  • What phones work the best with Asterisks while providing the most functionality from the Asterisk software?
  • Hardware cards for the server?
  • What’s the best SIP phone out there?
  • What protocol will provide the best quality of service?
  • What about redundancy if something may fail? How many lines per computer?
  • Is O/S really matter? I like BSD operating systems but what about up-to-date drivers and functionalities for Asterisk on a BSD system?

Any advice is appreciated.[/quote]