asterisk users - Nov 2004 - Over 10,000 lines. Will asterisk manage?

Hi all,

I am to come up with a proposal to setup a network of
over 15,000 lines. I would like to scale down the
costs by using Asterisk as the main switching
equipment. Let me give u the full scenario.

1. Fiber optic cables are to run from the central
exchange to over 2 kilometer radius at selected
distribution points.
2. Every subscriber will have a CAT5 cable terminating
at his residence/office. This will provide both
Internet/Voice and maybe video to the subscriber.
3. SIP phones will be used by the clients, codec
U-Law. Bandwidth is no problem since the fiber network
will provide over 10Gbit.
4. Fiber will run to the main Telecommunication
provider(PSTN) and 2 mobile providers.

Questions are which media protocol should I use? How
many asterisk servers will I need? Are SIP phones/IAX
phones reliable for this kind of project and are they
available in such quantities? How many simultaneous
calls can I achieve if no transcoding is being done? 

Keep in mind that their is no need for T1/PRI or any
other type of external lines. Asterisk is to switch
the voice data only.

I believe asterisk will be able to handle this without
a problem and its the way forward for a country which
is ages back in telecommunications. The client has
been approached to buy a switching equipment that can
handle the stated amount of lines for a figure of
$500,000. Asterisk can definately beat that.


Jafar

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I'm confident asterisk can manage such a setup, but you will need a damn 
good consultant to set it up.  :)
(You cannot buy just a huge asterisk machine, you will need some kind of 
cluster to do this).

Joachim (zoa)


jafar mohammed wrote:
>Hi all,
>
>I am to come up with a proposal to setup a network of
>over 15,000 lines. I would like to scale down the
>costs by using Asterisk as the main switching
>equipment. Let me give u the full scenario.
>
>1. Fiber optic cables are to run from the central
>exchange to over 2 kilometer radius at selected
>distribution points.
>2. Every subscriber will have a CAT5 cable terminating
>at his residence/office. This will provide both
>Internet/Voice and maybe video to the subscriber.
>3. SIP phones will be used by the clients, codec
>U-Law. Bandwidth is no problem since the fiber network
>will provide over 10Gbit.
>4. Fiber will run to the main Telecommunication
>provider(PSTN) and 2 mobile providers.
>
>Questions are which media protocol should I use? How
>many asterisk servers will I need? Are SIP phones/IAX
>phones reliable for this kind of project and are they
>available in such quantities? How many simultaneous
>calls can I achieve if no transcoding is being done? 
>
>Keep in mind that their is no need for T1/PRI or any
>other type of external lines. Asterisk is to switch
>the voice data only.
>
>I believe asterisk will be able to handle this without
>a problem and its the way forward for a country which
>is ages back in telecommunications. The client has
>been approached to buy a switching equipment that can
>handle the stated amount of lines for a figure of
>$500,000. Asterisk can definately beat that.
>
>
>Jafar
>
>__________________________________________________
>Do You Yahoo!?
>Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
>http://mail.yahoo.com 
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>  
>

--On Saturday, November 13, 2004 00:11 -0800 jafar mohammed 
<sonztechnology@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am to come up with a proposal to setup a network of
> over 15,000 lines. I would like to scale down the
> costs by using Asterisk as the main switching
> equipment. Let me give u the full scenario.
I have to agree with another person who said you'll need a decent 
consultant to set it up...and software to manage it.

As for that sort of quantity of SIP devices, the only ones I know you'd be 
able to get for sure in that quantity would be Cisco.  79XXs or the ATA's. 
Motorola ATA's are also an option.  Outside of that I don't know
personally.

keeping it all uLaw is probably good in this situation also because 
transcoding is a pretty heavy hit on the Asterisk server CPU.  Without 
transcoding I think having more than 500 *active* sessions per box should 
be easy, probably hit a couple thousand even, but that'd have to be tested.

With SIP devices it's not the number of devices - well, mostly, at some 
point the number of registration requests becomes an issue - but the number 
of active conversations in the system.  You can run a virtually unlimited 
number of SIP clients on a single box, but they couldn't all talk at once, 
unless you wanted a Chernobyl style melt-down.

Probably be about $100 or $200k in PC or other hardware.  Keep in mind that 
you have to have something with a USB controller for 2.4 kernels to source 
your timing off of, or in 2.6 it can use the RTC I believe.  In a pure IP 
environment you might be better off going to 2.6 anyway.

Just my $0.02

With a bit of money and hard work - many things are possible.

Brandon

>>4. Fiber will run to the main Telecommunication
>>provider(PSTN) and 2 mobile providers.
>>
[snip]
>>
>>Keep in mind that their is no need for T1/PRI or any
>>other type of external lines. Asterisk is to switch
>>the voice data only.
How are you linking to the PSTN referenced in (4) above then? How many 
concurrent calls have to go to the PSTN?

Linus

On Saturday 13 November 2004 09:11, jafar mohammed
wrote:
> I am to come up with a proposal to setup a network of
> over 15,000 lines. I would like to scale down the
> costs by using Asterisk as the main switching
> equipment. Let me give u the full scenario.
Wow, you gained 5000 lines between typing the subject and the body of this 
email :o)
Now *that's* exponential growth!

Anyway, I am but a newby, but if i understand correctly, the situation is 
thus:
A SIP phone *could* normally send its media stream directly from phone to 
phone, if no transcoding is required, but when using Asterisk the media 
stream will always pass through the server, causing a pottential bottleneck.
So, why not use SER to register all the SIP phones, as it doesn't handle the
media-streams, just keeps track of the phones and does the 'handshake'.
SER is supposed to be able to handle over 50.000 calls at a time, so one SER 
server would be enough.
Then interface this with one (or more) Asterisk servers to connect to the 
local PSTN.
But maybe I'm missing something fundamental, in which case I'm happy to
learn.

Cheers,
Richard