[ale] Asterisk for

[Chris Fowler]

On Thu, 2010-10-21 at 16:09 -0400, Ben Coleman wrote:
> 
> Would Asterisk work for this?  Particularly, would Asterisk running
> on,
> say, a Linode slice work for this (we'd rather not have this sitting
> behind one of the DSL lines at someone's home).  Would some other open
> source PBX software work better? 

I'm not sure if I would do that.

For asterisk timing is critical.  You can use the zaptel driver for this
and in my system I have a X100P PCI board that assists with this.  When
you don't have a PCI board then the zaptel driver can still provide
timing using the RTC.

VMs are frowned upon, again due to that timing issue.  I would suggest
_REAL_ hardware.    My system is on a real server sitting at Peak 10 in
Norcross.

DSL is not going to be possible.  First, home DSL service does not have
the bandwidth to support more than 1, 2 top calls.  You would be
surprised at how bad it sounds real quick.  Many short sighted
businesses decide to ditch the 24 channel T1 and get a SIP trunk over
DSL.  They regret that decision.  You'll need to turn off tracker while
you are talking on the phone.

If you want to go hosting try www.aretta.com.  They have solved the
timing issue and use VMs to host virtual PBX's.  I use their SIP service
and I've been pleased.

Good news is that decent phones can be cheap.  I bought a pile of
Grandtream GXP-2000's off eBay (NOT BUDGETTEL) and we use them.  They
support up to 4 lines, have speed dial buttons, and VM notification.
They are also easy to configure.

One thing I don't like about SIP phones is that they are too smart.  For
example I had one rep that figured out how to have his phone issue a 302
redirect.  I consider this something the admin should control.  I have
scripts that do follow-me and they need to use those instead.


Chris