asterisk users - Jan 2005 - something between an ATA and a channel bank for a small office?

I have had very bad experiences with IAXYs so far.. I have pulled them 
and will be attempting a refund shortly.  Bad audio, overheating and 
shutting down until allowed to cool, etc. make it unusable in a business 
environment.

That said, is there a low-mid priced solution for a remote office to 
connect to a home office runing asterisk?  There seems to be a hole in 
the market for 6-8 person remote offices.  SIP isn't really an option 
because the remote office is fairly low bandwidth (1.4 mb down, 256k up 
ADSL).

It seems my options are:
1. Inexpensive SIP phones connected to a local asterisk server which 
connects to my * server at the main office.

2. POTS phones + Asterisk + channel bank + t-1 card at remote office, 
connected to my asterisk server at main office

3. POTS phones and multiple FXS cards in * server at remote office with 
local T-1 line to terminate calls + IAX2 connection to main office for 
inter-office calls.

None of these seem ideal due to the complexity of having a remote * 
asterisk server in the loop.

Any suggestions?

On Tue, 18 Jan 2005 22:11:55 +0000, nik martin wrote:
>I have had very bad experiences with IAXYs so far.. I have pulled them 
>and will be attempting a refund shortly.  Bad audio, overheating and 
>shutting down until allowed to cool, etc. make it unusable in a business 
>environment.
>
>That said, is there a low-mid priced solution for a remote office to 
>connect to a home office runing asterisk?  There seems to be a hole in 
>the market for 6-8 person remote offices.  SIP isn't really an option 
>because the remote office is fairly low bandwidth (1.4 mb down, 256k up 
>ADSL).
>
>It seems my options are:
>1. Inexpensive SIP phones connected to a local asterisk server which 
>connects to my * server at the main office.
>
>2. POTS phones + Asterisk + channel bank + t-1 card at remote office, 
>connected to my asterisk server at main office
>
>3. POTS phones and multiple FXS cards in * server at remote office with 
>local T-1 line to terminate calls + IAX2 connection to main office for 
>inter-office calls.
>
>None of these seem ideal due to the complexity of having a remote * 
>asterisk server in the loop.
It seems to me that your data rate is abitrarily low. If you could get
a higher oubound data rate you'd have better results on average. I
switchedmy home office ADLS from 1.5M/384k to 3.0M/768k and the impact
was huge.

There certainly are mid-market SIP phones available. I'm enamoured of
my Polycom IP600, but the IP300 & 500 are less than $200 each. Avoiding
FXOs entirely will eliminate a major headache. I think that the
availability of business class features on SIP phones is worth more
than the slight cost savings you might achieve using ATAs with analog
phones.

Polycom IP300 = $140
Polycom IP500 = $210

I'd be inclined to build an embedded Asterisk for the remote location
and trunk back to your main office. You can also setup an account with
an ITSP like Sixtel.net or Voipjet and place outgoing calls directly
from the remote server.

Michael
 
--
Michael Graves                           mgraves@pixelpower.com
Sr. Product Specialist                          www.pixelpower.com
Pixel Power Inc.                                 mgraves@mstvp.com

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