[Asterisk-Users] Over 10,000 lines. Will asterisk manage?

[Michael Loftis]

--On Saturday, November 13, 2004 00:11 -0800 jafar mohammed 
<sonztechnology at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I am to come up with a proposal to setup a network of
> over 15,000 lines. I would like to scale down the
> costs by using Asterisk as the main switching
> equipment. Let me give u the full scenario.

I have to agree with another person who said you'll need a decent 
consultant to set it up...and software to manage it.

As for that sort of quantity of SIP devices, the only ones I know you'd be 
able to get for sure in that quantity would be Cisco.  79XXs or the ATA's. 
Motorola ATA's are also an option.  Outside of that I don't know personally.

keeping it all uLaw is probably good in this situation also because 
transcoding is a pretty heavy hit on the Asterisk server CPU.  Without 
transcoding I think having more than 500 *active* sessions per box should 
be easy, probably hit a couple thousand even, but that'd have to be tested.

With SIP devices it's not the number of devices - well, mostly, at some 
point the number of registration requests becomes an issue - but the number 
of active conversations in the system.  You can run a virtually unlimited 
number of SIP clients on a single box, but they couldn't all talk at once, 
unless you wanted a Chernobyl style melt-down.

Probably be about $100 or $200k in PC or other hardware.  Keep in mind that 
you have to have something with a USB controller for 2.4 kernels to source 
your timing off of, or in 2.6 it can use the RTC I believe.  In a pure IP 
environment you might be better off going to 2.6 anyway.

Just my $0.02