Hi all. I’ve been digging for a while and had trouble getting any specific comments on deployment recommendations that are appropriate for the setup I’m likely looking at (details below). Any feedback is appreciated. I’m in EARLY planning stages here (1yr lead time at least) but want to do this correctly.
GIVEN:
-Assume ~15 geographically distinct sites (across Canada)
-Each site is to have ~10-20 phones
-All sites will be on a common WAN/VPN infrastructure (computers at all 15 sites can ping each other via the VPN-WAN)
-WAN-VPN connectivity is via T1 or greater bandwidth (large academic sites)
-all sites will be making outbound calls to both (a) regular phone network and (b) other phones in the 15 sites
-I’m assuming we’ll simply use an external service provider to provide dial-in routing as well as outbound termination to PSTN network. (no PBX/PSTN bridge(s) in my asterisk box(es) - purely IP based).
QUESTIONS:
-Should I assume we need an asterisk server at each site for routing? Or can we simply have one (or two for redundancy) hosted centrally, and let IP traffic go from [all phones]–>viaWAN/VPN–>AsteriskServer–>Route to either internal phone clients or external termination service provider
-what kind of bandwidth are we to anticipate chewing with this kind of deployment (approx 20k/s up-and-down per active phone line …?) Should we expect too many latency issues if using central asterisk server vs distributed servers?
-clearly fewer centralized servers would be easier to setup/maintain than having such rigs at all sites … hence the query.
… many thanks for your assistance with this …
—Tim Chipman