PSTN conference bridge

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

I would like to use Asterisk purely as a PSTN conference bridge for 60 concurrent conference participants. They connect by calling a DID number and then enter a PIN code - without having to enter a specific conference room. The Asterisk server will be connected to 2 E1’s.

  1. Is Asterisk suitable for this purpose?
  2. Can it be configured once and then be left alone serving as conference bridge only?
  3. What are the known problems or short comings of Asterisk in such a set up?
  4. Does OpenPBX’s nConference successfully address some of the known issues?
  5. What are the minimum specifications for the server, in terms of CPU, RAM, HD, etc.?

Thanks in advance
Felix

2
  1. yes
  2. sure, you will of course have to reconfigure pin codes if you want them to change.
  3. you need hardware capable enough to mix all those streams. Any new-ish server should do.
  4. Never used OpenPBX, it looks interesting though. The main improvement that I know of is better timer support, but Asterisk+Zaptel has always worked reliably for me (without a hardware card).
  5. any modern-ish server should do- 2GHz range cpu, 512mb memory, any disk. Asterisk doesn’t have a huge memory footprint and won’t use much disk unless you are recording stuff, the only resource it needs is some CPU for all that audio mixing. The above system will do it and have plenty of room to spare.