Looking to provide traditional pbx functions for small business (No Voip)with asterisk (Astlinux really, but that is beside the point for now). I am looking for recomendations from the hardware gurus out here on this board. I would like to be able to set an asterisk box up for a test in my shop and I am looking for some VERY inexpensive hardware to do that on. Would you guys reccomend a regular pc for the processing power and then buying and fxo & fxs card, or do you reccomend moving forward with a single board computer for the test? Below is the normal situation of these small businesses:
4 pots ----------/ PBX/--------8 phones
So, I am looking for recomendations on a 1 or 4 port fxo for test (probably 1 port for cost effectiveness) and a 1 or 4 port fxs for test. Would ebay be a good source to pick these up or not?
I just wanted to post a follow up for everyone on this board. Thanks a million you have all be very helpful! The abundance of community here is overwhelming…
hehe sorry, sometimes threads fall through the cracks.
it really depends. the cheapest FXO you can get is the X100 clone card at around $10-25 each (one port per card), however the x100 clones are often to blame for a wide variety of issues including (but not limited to): heavy, unsolvable echo; impedence matching issues; call quality issues; etc. Sometimes they work great, sometimes you screw with it until it works great, and sometimes it doesn’t work at all or never starts working usably. At $25/port they’re a great bargain, but might not be such a good bargain if they don’t work well for your business.
Cheapest FXS you can get is ATAs (external SIP-POTS adapters), at around $40-$50/port.
That said- I’d bite the bullet and go with a Sangoma A200 series card. You can get it in the config you need (4FXO/8FXS) but you are paying more like $70-$80/port. It will cost a lot to get started but you will have far less issues and problems with it and using it for your business.