VoIP and Asterisk

[Bill Mullen]

On Wed, 2004-09-29 at 17:05, Kenneth E. Lussier wrote:

> The 32 internal phones could be a bit of a problem. If you are planning
> on switching to IP phones, then it's no problem. You just plug the
> phones and the asterisk box into the network. You could also switch to
> "soft-phones" and have people use their PC's as their phones. You can
> get IP phones fairly cheap if you just want standard desk phones.
> 
> If you want to keep the 32 analog phones, then there could be a problem,
> as you would need 32 FXS ports (8 cards x 4 ports each), and I don't
> know too many systems that have 9 or 10 PCI slots. However, chances are,
> the phones that you have are not analog phones. They are most likely
> digital, and would require an ATA.

You could use two channel banks, with one of them connected to all eight
outgoing lines and sixteen of the internal lines, and the other hooked
up to the remaining internal lines, and then all you'd need on the box
are two PCI slots (for T100P's), AFAICT.

It seems that this could also be handled by running two (or more)
asterisk boxes, and letting them hand off calls between themselves;
between them there would be enough PCI slots for sufficient h/w to
accommodate the analog lines, and IIUIC, asterisk is designed to
interoperate well with itself in exactly this fashion.

See sections 2.3.2 and 2.3.3, respectively, in:
http://www.digium.com/handbook-draft.pdf

-- 
Bill Mullen
RLU# 270075