What hardware should i use (SPA ATA or Digium card)

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

I have a project of setting up asterisk for 4 initial analog lines that will be expanded to 16 lines within 1 year to be used by 30 operator.

in summary, i have a teleco company providing me with 4…16 lines.
Budget is very tight, so i need to make the most cost effective decision.
with budget in mind, i thought i’ll go with spa 8000 ( http://www.voiplink.com/Linksys_SPA_8000_p/linksys-spa-8000.htm ) X 4 (2 for backup just in case of failure)
and use separate switch to connect these to a debian box running asterisk with sip support.

Another scenario is to use a digium card. but it’s expensive. a 4 port card costs around 700$ (16 fxs port costs 1512 $ without shipping according to store.digium.com/boards/#search/1TDM880EF ) naturally i’ll be saving cost of switch and i’ll gain hardware integration within the sytem.

The cost of digium + server, is cutting it close in compared to acquiring a commercial pbx which does the same thing but has full commercial support for N years and hardware warranty

Any thoughts about this ? i’m worried about the robustness of the spa hardware/solution. (this is a mission critical solution, and a 99.9% up time is to be expected)

2

spa8000 provides multiple fxs ports to plug pot (plain old phones), you need fxo ports to plug your pstn lines. spa3102 gives you one each.

3

When it comes to a dilemma between a card and a gateway, I always choose a gateway. The only guidance I would give you is that you choose a good quality one and not a low-cost one. In the end you are setting up a phone system that needs to be reliable. Cheap hardware does not have any place in such an application.