Archived from groups: comp.dcom.voice-over-ip (
More info?)
<appan@btinternet.com> wrote in message
news:1119443089.393025.303270@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> Asterisk is a software based solutions require skill in set up and
> maintanence.
> But the PBXs are made like commodity and needs minimum skill and
> expertise to set up and maintanence.
this depends on scale and complexity - simple setups are meant to be easy,
but like most other IT related systems, things get complicated and need more
care and attention as they get bigger.
> As mentioned opensource require high tech support and it is costly. But
> Asterisk offer features and facility far ahead of any PBX.
> The scalability, quality etc,, are very good for Asterisk and only you
> need to add more hardware resources.
i think this may actually be a key point.
FWIW - the "expensive" commercial systems such as Cisco call manager tend to
spend a big chunk of the total systems cost on end points and gateways. So
IP phones, or convertors to support existing analog handsets, and gateways
to access PSTN etc is where a lot of money ends up.
The high end softswitches used by PSTN providers are even more biased
towards peripheral costs as the individual modes scale up the number of end
points per system.
I cant see how having a "free" central call management piece can affect the
direct cost of the bits that use separate hardware to scale up.
again on call manager you can put gateways cards into the central processor
(or you could initially) - but this severely restricts the number of end
points, call setup rates and other scale limits.
to answer the original Q - last time i checked call manager could handle
37000 end points as a single logical PBX using a central server cluster
i cant see any reason that asterix cant go to similar scale with a similar
design- but if it did i would want a 2 or 4 hour fix support + maint
contract on it, design that would survive loss of any server etc - and i
think that might be hard to find for a non commercial product.
One of the advantages with something commercial like the cisco is that they
will provide a reference design, and commit to scaling rules, size limits
and so on.
> The development in Asterisk going on for embedded linux etc to make the
> system simple.
>
--
Regards
Stephen Hope - return address needs fewer xxs