asterisk users - Aug 2004 - Hardware for PBX with 4 incoming/outgoing lines and 20 phones

Hi

I am interested in setting up an Asterisk PBX in my office with digium 
hardware, and I just have a few questions in regards to what I would 
need.  It is my understanding that an FXO card is used to interface with 
an incoming/outgoing phone line, and an FXS card is used for interfacing 
with a phone within the system.  Currently we have 4 incoming/outgoing 
phone lines and would like to have 20 phones in the system.  In order to 
accomodate this, would you either reccommend having 1 TDM04B (4 FXO 
modules on it) for the 4 incoming/outgoing lines, and 5 TDM40B (4 FXS 
modules on each) for the 20 phones we would have in the system.  Or 
would you reccommend 1 TDM04B for the 4 incoming/outgoing lines, and a 
T100P connected to a channel bank of some sort to connect to the 
internal phones?  If you reccommend the T100P and channel bank, where do 
you suggest I get an FXS channel bank?  Please let me know if I got any 
of this mixed up (like if I got the FXO and FXS cards mixed up) and 
thank you in advance for your help in us deciding the hardware we need 
for a new PBX.

Andrew Elchuk

P.S.  We are currently using an X-Like software phone with a free world 
dialup account for communication with our other office in a different 
city.  My question is if I can configure the extensions.conf to connect 
to a free world dialup number when executing a dial command, or would I 
need to edit sip.conf as well or some other configs or is that even 
possible?  Thank you again.

-- 
Andrew Elchuk
Technical Associate
Cronus Technologies
248 - 111 Research Drive
Saskatoon, SK  S7N 2X8
Tel: (306) 652-5798 ext. 112
Fax: (306) 652-5799
Toll Free: 1-877-655-5798
http://www.cronustech.com

Andrew,

Sounds like it could be a good fit for your needs. Although that
raises many questions as to how exactly you should deploy it. If you
have a good Internet connection to the office in question you could
perhaps use VOIP termination for your outbound calls instead of the
current 4 PSTN lines. This way if all 20 people on the system could
make calls at once or just 4 and you would only pay per minute on the
usage.

If you have good analog phones already then probably the channel bank
route is the best way to support that many phones. Otherwise you could
get IP Phones such as the Cisco 79xx , Polycom's or Snoms.

Hard to say really what's best without knowing more of how much phone
usage is in question and how much you would like to invest in an
Asterisk/VOIP solution.

Hopefully this along with the other posts you get on the list help you
on your deployment. I'd be curious as to what you finally decide on
after you weight the options.

On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 17:11:36 -0600, Andrew Elchuk
<aelchuk@cronustech.com> wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am interested in setting up an Asterisk PBX in my office with digium
> hardware, and I just have a few questions in regards to what I would
> need.  It is my understanding that an FXO card is used to interface with
> an incoming/outgoing phone line, and an FXS card is used for interfacing
> with a phone within the system.  Currently we have 4 incoming/outgoing
> phone lines and would like to have 20 phones in the system.  In order to
> accomodate this, would you either reccommend having 1 TDM04B (4 FXO
> modules on it) for the 4 incoming/outgoing lines, and 5 TDM40B (4 FXS
> modules on each) for the 20 phones we would have in the system.  Or
> would you reccommend 1 TDM04B for the 4 incoming/outgoing lines, and a
> T100P connected to a channel bank of some sort to connect to the
> internal phones?  If you reccommend the T100P and channel bank, where do
> you suggest I get an FXS channel bank?  Please let me know if I got any
> of this mixed up (like if I got the FXO and FXS cards mixed up) and
> thank you in advance for your help in us deciding the hardware we need
> for a new PBX.
> 
> Andrew Elchuk
> 
> P.S.  We are currently using an X-Like software phone with a free world
> dialup account for communication with our other office in a different
> city.  My question is if I can configure the extensions.conf to connect
> to a free world dialup number when executing a dial command, or would I
> need to edit sip.conf as well or some other configs or is that even
> possible?  Thank you again.
> 
> --
> Andrew Elchuk
> Technical Associate
> Cronus Technologies
> 248 - 111 Research Drive
> Saskatoon, SK  S7N 2X8
> Tel: (306) 652-5798 ext. 112
> Fax: (306) 652-5799
> Toll Free: 1-877-655-5798
> http://www.cronustech.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Asterisk-Users mailing list
> Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com
> http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
>    http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
>

Andrew Elchuk wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am interested in setting up an Asterisk PBX in my office with digium
> hardware, and I just have a few questions in regards to what I would
> need.  It is my understanding that an FXO card is used to interface
> with an incoming/outgoing phone line, and an FXS card is used for
> interfacing with a phone within the system.  Currently we have 4
> incoming/outgoing phone lines and would like to have 20 phones in the
> system.  In order to accomodate this, would you either reccommend
> having 1 TDM04B (4 FXO modules on it) for the 4 incoming/outgoing
> lines, and 5 TDM40B (4 FXS modules on each) for the 20 phones we
> would have in the system.  Or would you reccommend 1 TDM04B for the 4
> incoming/outgoing lines, and a T100P connected to a channel bank of
> some sort to connect to the internal phones?  If you reccommend the
> T100P and channel bank, where do you suggest I get an FXS channel
> bank?  Please let me know if I got any of this mixed up (like if I
> got the FXO and FXS cards mixed up) and thank you in advance for your
> help in us deciding the hardware we need for a new PBX.
Will your users be happy with single line analog phones at their desks?

If you go the channel bank route, you'll need a channel for each phone.

If you use the T-1 card, you'll have 24 analog channels total. You could set
up 4 to plug into analog lines from your carrier, and the rest to analog
phones in your office. The catch here is, you've then maxed out your (T1)
channel bank.

(I have not used any digium hardware, so I can't speak to the
effectiveness/ease-of-setup of a particular configuration.)
> 
> Andrew Elchuk
> 
> P.S.  We are currently using an X-Like software phone with a free
> world dialup account for communication with our other office in a
> different city.  My question is if I can configure the
> extensions.conf to connect to a free world dialup number when
> executing a dial command, or would I need to edit sip.conf as well or
> some other configs or is that even possible?  Thank you again.
If you have a static IP connection to the net, you can get by without using
FWD.

Using FWD as an intermediary or not, you would be able to configure standard
extensions or phone numbers inside your office that when called pipe out
over the net to your other office. If you spend enough time on it, you could
map extensions(as extensions or whole phone numbers) into asterisk on both
sides so that when anyone dialed a number for the other office asterisk
would transparently route it directly to the intended person on the other
side.

-----
Andrew Thompson
http://aktzero.com/

IMHO, If you plan to use analog phones the cheapest is to buy a bunch
of sipuras instead of TDM40B. (TDM40B = 4 FXS for $300, $75 each;
sipura SPA2000 = 2 FXS for $100, $50 each)

Order one TDM04B (4 FXO) and 1 Sipura 2000 for each 2 analog extensions. 

You can also mix it up, lets say drop two incoming lines and order a 2
FXS, 2 FXO TDM instead. Then subscribe to a VoIP provider like
Voicepulse Connect to dial-out through IAX.

Use the FXS on the TDM for fax machines and make these the only to
dial-out through the analog outgoing lines.

Of course, I would rather buy some IP phones instead of analog ones through FXS.

For your remote office, depending on the number of extensions, you can
either setup a small asterisk box or just use Sipuras 3000 and 2000
connected to your main office's asterisk server.


On Tue, 24 Aug 2004 17:11:36 -0600, Andrew Elchuk
<aelchuk@cronustech.com> wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I am interested in setting up an Asterisk PBX in my office with digium
> hardware, and I just have a few questions in regards to what I would
> need.  It is my understanding that an FXO card is used to interface with
> an incoming/outgoing phone line, and an FXS card is used for interfacing
> with a phone within the system.  Currently we have 4 incoming/outgoing
> phone lines and would like to have 20 phones in the system.  In order to
> accomodate this, would you either reccommend having 1 TDM04B (4 FXO
> modules on it) for the 4 incoming/outgoing lines, and 5 TDM40B (4 FXS
> modules on each) for the 20 phones we would have in the system.  Or
> would you reccommend 1 TDM04B for the 4 incoming/outgoing lines, and a
> T100P connected to a channel bank of some sort to connect to the
> internal phones?  If you reccommend the T100P and channel bank, where do
> you suggest I get an FXS channel bank?  Please let me know if I got any
> of this mixed up (like if I got the FXO and FXS cards mixed up) and
> thank you in advance for your help in us deciding the hardware we need
> for a new PBX.
> 
> Andrew Elchuk
> 
> P.S.  We are currently using an X-Like software phone with a free world
> dialup account for communication with our other office in a different
> city.  My question is if I can configure the extensions.conf to connect
> to a free world dialup number when executing a dial command, or would I
> need to edit sip.conf as well or some other configs or is that even
> possible?  Thank you again.
> 
> --
> Andrew Elchuk
> Technical Associate
> Cronus Technologies
> 248 - 111 Research Drive
> Saskatoon, SK  S7N 2X8
> Tel: (306) 652-5798 ext. 112
> Fax: (306) 652-5799
> Toll Free: 1-877-655-5798
> http://www.cronustech.com
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Asterisk-Users mailing list
> Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com
> http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
> To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit:
>    http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
>