What cheap hardware setup for 6 lines with call queing?

Asterisk Asterisk Support
1

Hi,

I want to set up an Asterisk system for the local public radio station because their current system for their pledge drives is just 6 phone lines in a ring down. It ends up that the person in seat 6 almost never gets a call and the person in seat 1 gets all the calls.

I’ve been researching economical systems and this seems to be the best and will also meet all the needs. Their budget is very small so that is a major concern.

I want to set this up with the 6 lines with a distributed call queue, any suggestions on the best hardware setup and what kind of phones to use?

The budget is ~500 for everything. Is that possible?

TIA!

2

You might just get 3 TDM400P Digium cards.

You would configure one with all FXO modules, one with all FXS modules, and one with 2 of each.

That way you can just use standard analog stations. (Which is easy to adapt to broadcast if necessary.)

Alternatively, you can have the incoming line hunt mode changed. There’s linear hunts and there’s circular hunts. You have a linear hunt method, and you can have the phone company change the hunt type to circular. Problem solved, no expense at all.

3

The cheapest that I’ve found a TDM400P card with 4x FXO interfaces is 319.95. Two cards with 6x FXO cards between them will put you over $500 already, and that’s without the server or the phones.

I thik that you can find Wildcart X100P clones pretty cheap on ebay (like $10). You would just need to get a used PC with 6 free PCI slots. Maybe you could find a way split up the incoming trunks among multiple servers or something, and then get cheap analog phones with cheap ATA adapters (The Grandstream Handytone 286 can be had for around $50).

4

Another solution…

what about a voIP solution instead of FXO/FXS cards?

Get voicepulse for incoming lines, and use 3 sipura 2002 boxes to connect the six lines to asterisk.

This is assuming, of course, you have broadband. And, I’m not sure what how six lines at the same time would do over your connection.

5

So, what kind of computer would be needed for this setup? Would a PIII 500-700 with 256mb of ram work?

Also would the unlocked Linksys pap2 work for 2 lines? Then I can get them free after rebate and just use 3.

So those Wildcart X100P would handle the 6 lines then I have a switch plugged into the computer for the ATAs?

6

[quote=“netnameus”]Another solution…

what about a voIP solution instead of FXO/FXS cards?

Get voicepulse for incoming lines, and use 3 sipura 2002 boxes to connect the six lines to asterisk.

This is assuming, of course, you have broadband. And, I’m not sure what how six lines at the same time would do over your connection.[/quote]

They are a little scared of voip still…

7

[quote]So, what kind of computer would be needed for this setup? Would a PIII 500-700 with 256mb of ram work?

. . .

So those Wildcart X100P would handle the 6 lines then I have a switch plugged into the computer for the ATAs?[/quote]

For 6 lines, you could probably get away with a PIII 700. You may want to invest in a little bit more RAM, though. The Wildcard X100P only handles one phone line, though. You’d need to have a motherboard that had enough PCI slots.

Yes, you’d need an ethernet switch to plug the ATA’s and the server into. You mentioned that the’re a little bit uncomfortable with VoIP still. I’m assuming that you mean telephone service from a VoIP Providor. I’m sure that you guessed that using ATA’s means using VoIP internally.