[COLUG] Asterisk

[Duane]

Aaron Howard wrote:

> Okay, so after reading posts to the list and doing a little googling,
> I am more confused than I was before.  VOIP is all well and good, but
> I thought one main advantage of Asterisk is that it will not only do
> VOIP but PBX with a PRI card so it can interface directly to POTS.

The problem with Asterisk is it isn't very vendor neutral and the vendor
it favours doesn't have the best PRI cards available. If you do want
another vendors products it usually requires a lot of work patching the
code etc.

> If somebody were to set up SER/OpenSER or some other straight VOIP
> system, do they then just have to sign up with a SIP-to-POTS gateway
> service?  Or does SER and/or OpenSER support that directly?

You can get channel banks to handle both the termination and DSP
functions, and in some respects this can scale a lot better then doing
it in a PC because it is dedicated hardware specifically designed for
the task.

The better question is how many ports do you need to deal with, and
there is other options other then SIP and IAX available for port
terminations, but I'm guessing this would be a little beyond what you
had in mind. :)

-- 

Best regards,
 Duane

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"In the long run the pessimist may be proved right,
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