Asterisk or other option?

[James Finstrom]

Well being that this is what I do I guess I will pipe up.

Asterisk should be fine but you may also want to search for Freeswitch. If
you dont know asterisk and have to learn anyway Freeswitch may be a good
option. If you want the most painless entry in to Asterisk you will want to
use a pre-made distro. We use Druid here in the office but there are other
options like Elastix, PBX in a Flash, and trixbox.

As was mentioned almost any off the shelf PC will do ok. If you will be
running hardware telephony interfaces I would avoid the throw away boards as
the cards are high interrupt devices and some really cheap main boards
simply cant handle it. For something your size you can probably get away
with an Atom board. Having all your stations as sip should be ok but this
should be an Isolated network so when a few people stream youtube the calls
dont degrade. As far as additional hardware goes you havent provided enough
data. Do you have pots lines, a T1, Voip? How many lines are coming in?

If you need to terminate to the pstn best advice is DON'T BE CHEAP. Using
cheap cards will make your job harder as they are not
often professionally supported and can lead to a project being scrapped for
being junk. I would hope you buy Rhino (http://rhinoequipment.com) as they
are 1. Where I work. 2. Made in the US. 3. An Arizona company. That said you
have other choices and I would stick to Rhino or one of these other two if
you want your stuff to work: Digium (http://digium.com) or Sangoma (
http://sangoma.com) Note Sangoma is a Canadian company if that matters. Our
company and these other two provide installation support of the hardware and
back what they sell. The card(s) you need will depend on the manufacturer
and the interfacing. If you want to email me privately we can hash out more
specific details of what you need for your environment.

Regards,

-- 
James Finstrom
Rhino Equipment Corp.
http://rhinoequipment.com ~ http://postug.com
Phone: 1-877-RHINO-T1 ~ FAX: +1 (480) 961-1826
Twitter: http://twitter.com/rhinoequipment
IP: guest at asterisk.rhinoequipment.com


On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 9:19 PM, Kevin Brown <kevin_brown at qwest.net> wrote:

> I'm trying to spec out a PBX or similar system for a startup company. The
> requirements for such a system would be 10-15 phones (either analog or
> digital phones), 1 or 2 fax lines (obviously analog) and voicemail for same,
> as well as the recommended link to the outside world. Mostly I'm trying to
> figure out about how much this would cost with setup as part of a
> presentation. Unfortunately I can't give out a whole lot of information as I
> haven't been able to get any of my questions answered (this was dumped on me
> today and wanted by Wed. morning along with servers, switches, Internet
> access, etc...).
>
> Not looking for sales pitches, but wouldn't object to responses from local
> vendors, heheh.
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