asterisk users - Oct 2003 - Some questions of heavy * deployment and stability.

I've reading this lists few months.
We are small company, that makes some system intregration, development and
deployments in VoIP scene.
Completely under linux. Today i have 6 machines with asterisk, huge test base -
including devices like AS5350, Audiocodes gateways,
ATAs, IP phones ...
Now is time to make a decition for including * in our future projects. Main goal
for us is the Stability. Peoples expects phones just to work.
I expirienced some stability issues with some channel drivers - mostly in h.323,
small in SIP, small in the other applications - queue, conf.
I still waiting for my digium cards to make field test with it.
However, our first deployments will be only chan_zap and chan_iax based, maybe
future usage of chan_sip.
I have some questions:

How stable are these channel drivers?
Is there any commercial support for faster bugcleaning, fixing ... (anything
will be in the GPL field)?
Is there any way for more stability of SIP channel drivers?
Will be some support (including bugfixes/stability issues) if we buy a lot of
digium cards (let say 20+ TE410 for 6 months).

I'm asking this, becouse i have on my horizons deployment of telephone
system for a small city (2000-5000 users for 2 years) shortly after New Year.
I evaluating using of * for this deployment. Unfortunately, our team didn't
include expirience C programmers, so i think that we will need some external
support in this field.

Thanks.

Anton Tinchev
Unix Solutions ltd
Sofia, Bulgaria.

P.S.
If i can help to someone with my test resources or make some interoperability
tests/repots for my devices, just drop me a line.

<quote who="Anton Tinchev">
> How stable are these channel drivers?
I haven't run into any real stability issues, then again I just have
4 grandstreams sitting on a desk. :)
Oh, and a CAC AB1 channel bank connected to a Digium T100P.
> Is there any commercial support for faster bugcleaning, fixing ...
> (anything will be in the GPL field)?
http://www.digium.com/index.php?menu=software_support
Look at the second support option...
> Is there any way for more stability of SIP channel drivers?
> Will be some support (including bugfixes/stability issues) if we buy
> a lot of digium cards (let say 20+ TE410 for 6 months).
>
> I'm asking this, becouse i have on my horizons deployment of telephone
> system for a small city (2000-5000 users for 2 years) shortly after New
> Year.
That sounds really cool.  I am sure the whole list would like to hear
how it goes.

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