This page and it’s siblings suggest some configurations of hardware and software for setting up an Asterisk based PBX. Most of these are based on running configurations in various organizations today.
Sample Hardware Recommendations
Scaling an Asterisk system isn’t easy, there are no simple answers. Next to the samples below, we suggest you read about capacity considerations when planning and dimensioning an Asterisk system.
- Asterisk embedded systems
- Asterisk Appliances
- Asterisk setup heavy office: ACD heavy office suggestions
- Asterisk setup home: home user with 1-2 telco lines and 2-4 phones
- Asterisk setup IVR: IVR or Conference heavy suggestions
- Asterisk setup medium office: medium office with full E1/T1 and 24-48 phones
- Asterisk setup medium office 100: medium office with 2-4 E1/T1s and 48-100 phones
- Asterisk setup minimum: really small
- Asterisk setup multi-location: multi-location corporate offices with 16-64 E1/T1s distributed and 500-2500 phones
- Asterisk setup research lab: 20 phones
- Asterisk setup soho 16: small office with 3-8 telco lines and 5-16 phones
- Asterisk setup soho 24: small office with a fractional E1/T1 and 12-24 phones
- Asterisk setup soho 4 CO 12 extensions: small office with 4 telco lines and 12 phones (echo-free & trouble-free)
- Discussion of hardware to use for small home installations with analog lines and phones
Success Stories & Working Samples
There are a number of VoIP providers that run Asterisk offering IAX connectivity (often with the SIP proxy SER in front of it).
- Asterisk setup success 1: Steven Critchfield’s office configuration
- Asterisk setup success 2: A configuration with no VOIP and three Asterisk PBX’s working together
- Asterisk setup success 3: A service provider’s configuration
- Asterisk setup success 4: Small office setup
- Asterisk setup success 5: IT company with 12 phones
- Asterisk setup success 6: Medium Size Business with 50 IP phones and 11 POTS lines
- Asterisk setup success 7: School Campus site
- Asterisk setup success 8: Entire School District
- Asterisk setup success 9: Church and School with 30+ IP phones and 7 POTS lines
Quoting Rich Tehrani:
“Currently you ll find Asterisk (or * as it is referred to frequently on message boards) in corporations where the IS staff is enterprising enough to set this type of telephony server up. You will also find it in numerous CLECs that won’t share this fact with anyone as it is a significant competitive advantage.”
Quoting Mark Spencer (in Saarbruecken):
(Transcribed, answering a question about known larger deployments)
One of the implementations that we know about 800 Pingtel IP phones. For busy operators these JAVA-based phones are not ideal since they require regular reboots. Also Vonage is using Asterisk and has made a lot of contributions to the project, they are using it for voicemail. There is also a large analog installation to be found at Frys Eletronics, which is a large US retailer.
Quoting Stefen Sokol (April 2004):
There are carriers using Asterisk to terminate thousands of lines. NuFone has a data center with 80 Asterisk servers in place. These installations require a bit more engineering than the typical PBX server, but the system does scale to extremely large systems.
Francois Lambert, Atelka, Inc:
We are running a call center with 4 Asterisk servers (10 T1 + 1 Channel Bank). We have internally 240 agents using IAX Softphone with uLaw codec.
We have 200 inbound agents and 40 outbound agents. We know that our architecture is scalable to go up in the 1000 agents and more.
See Also
-
- Asterisk at large Tips for large installations (SIP proxy, load balancing)
- Asterisk config files
- Asterisk dimensioning: How do I determine my system capacity?
- Asterisk hardware: Specific hardware known to work with asterisk
- Asterisk rollout tips
- Asterisk system vendors including turnkey solutions of different sizes
- Case studies_Repadfield’s Molecube IP-PBX System Empower by Synway
- Public Sector Training with Greg Vance, Digium
- Testimonials
- Interface boards
July 26, 2017
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