Hello, I am in the planning stages of building an Asterisk PBX for an English-langage K-12 school in Vienna, Austria, and have a few questions on hardware. We have an E1/PRI phone company connection, and need to support about 100 analog POTS extensions, while also implementing VoIP for calls to the US and the UK. We also have a second E1 for Internet connectivity, terminating in a Cisco router. It seems to me that the best thing would be to get a single-port Digium E1 card for the phone company link, and either a 4-port E1 or 4-port T1 card with corresponding 24-port channel banks for the analog extensions. Here is my question: can someone recommend specific brands/models of channel banks to use for this and can someone recommend reliable sources for USED channelbanks which will work in this scenario? Alternatively, is there another, better, cheaper way of accomplishing this? Is anyone aware of companies which will give special deals to non-profit educational institutions? Are there any "operator console" GUIs available for Asterisk? Finally, is there anyone in Germany or Austria or some other nearby country (Central Europe) who has implemented an Asterisk installation of this scope and would be willing to have me visit and pick his/her brain? Thank you, Wolf Paul
On Fri, 1 Oct 2004, Wolf N. Paul wrote:> We have an E1/PRI phone company connection, and need to support about > 100 analog POTS extensions, while also implementing VoIP for calls to > the US and the UK. > > We also have a second E1 for Internet connectivity, terminating in a > Cisco router. > > It seems to me that the best thing would be to get a single-port Digium > E1 card for the phone company link, and either a 4-port E1 or 4-port T1 > card with corresponding 24-port channel banks for the analog extensions.The TE405P and TE410P 4-port cards are E1/T1 selectable per span. There are advantages in keeping a call within one 4-port E1 card. The timing is not carried between cards so a call coming in on one card and going out over another card may have slips. Also, calls between cards have to cross the pci bus whereas connections between spans on the same card stay on the card. You would almost get by with 3 E1 spans ( =90 pots lines). Unfortunalty E1 channel banks are a lot more expensive. Do you plan to use transcoding for the VoIP trunks to reduce the bandwidth used? Depending on how much internal traffic you expect between the extensions you may want to handle the extensions on one machine and the external connections + transcoding for VoIP on another machine. Peter
Hi, On Fri, 01 Oct 2004 13:59:08 +0200, Wolf N. Paul <wnp@doulos.at> wrote:> Hello, > > Are there any "operator console" GUIs available for Asterisk?You can try the Flash Operator Panel, http://www.asternic.org I have released a new version today. Best regards, -- Nicol?s Gudi?o Buenos Aires - Argentina