Small to medium sized business, how do you do your Asterisk?

It really depends on the situation. What equipment do you have onsite. Do you have a normal PBX and Normal Phones or do you have IP Phones? One solution is to have a hosted * at a Datacenter connected to a Adtran at your site. The Adtran could connect via pots lines into your PBX. You could leave some of the lines into the PBX as normal lines from the telco if you want in case your internet goes down. The advantage to this solution is as you open up multiple branch locations you don't need to worry about obtaining multiple * servers.

I perfer to have a single highly available Asterisk server (Raid, Redundant Power etc.) I use multiple VoIP Providers for outgoing, and a reliable VoIP provider for incoming. I keep PSTN lines for faxing. Some offices have all IP phones, some an Adtran connected to their POTs PBX.

-Dr.B

Well one of our locations has a Nortel PBX and about 25 POTs phones. At that location we use a Adtran Total Access 608, which is a ADSL2+ router that has 8 FXS ports. We connect the 8 fxs ports to the Nortel. The Adtran connects to the centrally hosted Asterisk server via the ADSL2+ SIP connection (Full Duplex). These Adtrans come in many different varieties, ADSL, T1 and different FXS configurations 4 port or 8.

I agree with you, with 30 seats you are going to need some kind of PBX on site.

Our ISP provides us unlimited incoming and outgoing local calling for 10 dollars per DID (Only because we buy bandwidth from them also). We use a few 1.1 cent providers for outgoing long distance. Using local trunks for incoming is option we considered, however we figured it is cheaper to just go all VoIP. The Extra reduntancy would be the deciding factor and in the end, the Boss wanted to save money.

Could you tell me about your cell-phone failovers?

-Dr.B

At that location I just keep the old Infrastructure in place. The only device at that site that uses SIP is the adtran itself. Yes all inbound calls go through the asterisk to the adtran then to the Nortel PBX. I didn't have to make any major changes changes at that site, just installed the Adtran. Doesn't matter if you have SIP phones or not.

Very cool, though I would drop the cable modem and go ADSL2+ (If you are near the Central Office) Full Duplex lots of bandwidth and it's very cheap. Least in my area (Michigan, USA) your results may me different though.

Cheers
Dr.B

Hi,

one thing you have to remember, in the big picture cost is less importens that relairibility.
so that is way meny companys only use VoIP internaly and PSTN externaly.
the main reason is that the PSTN company must be albe to provide service during power failuer and, it is normal posible to pay for 24/365 fast repair service.
An other factor is that unfortional some VoIP providers have problem delivering (98% or lower), try ask your boss what you will lose if the phones is out for 2-5 days each year

What VoIP Providers are you currently using and having problems with? Maybe we can recommend some better ones which could minimize issues.

I agree, however I don't see why they would do it myself. If you are using Asterisk your software is free. Why skimp on the hardware? Even if you build a 1U Intel Platform Server with a redundant PS and drives, you are still under $1,600.00. Granted there are some other costs such as a good QoS router or digium card, and as you mentioned a good UPS. But still, traditional PBX's cost much more and do much less.

-DrB

This is exactly what we're doing.

I work for a company with about 50 employees. We have our Head-office in Milwaukee, and 4 branch offices around Wisconsin and Illinois, all connected to each-other over a 384Kbps MPLS WAN.

Each office has POTS lines for incoming calls and a T1 for the main office, as well as a fairly fault-tolerant Dell 1800 server running A@H (I'll be upgrading to Trixbox soon). All of the phones run off of PoE switches, which are plugged into a UPS, along with the phone-server and WAN Router.

As soon as I get QoS working properly on my WAN routers, I'll be setting up IAX2 trunks between the offices.

We are not going to try setting up one monolithic voicemial server across all branches. We're happy with it being stored on the local servers. I haven't set up the Outlook integration yet either, but we're getting ready to shop around for a real CRM package soon, so it may be a moot-point anyway.

Jared Liebl
MIS Manager
Climatic Contol Company