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

[Richard Bennett]

On Saturday 13 November 2004 09:11, jafar mohammed wrote:
> 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.

Wow, you gained 5000 lines between typing the subject and the body of this 
email :o)
Now *that's* exponential growth!

Anyway, I am but a newby, but if i understand correctly, the situation is 
thus:
A SIP phone *could* normally send its media stream directly from phone to 
phone, if no transcoding is required, but when using Asterisk the media 
stream will always pass through the server, causing a pottential bottleneck.
So, why not use SER to register all the SIP phones, as it doesn't handle the 
media-streams, just keeps track of the phones and does the 'handshake'.
SER is supposed to be able to handle over 50.000 calls at a time, so one SER 
server would be enough.
Then interface this with one (or more) Asterisk servers to connect to the 
local PSTN.
But maybe I'm missing something fundamental, in which case I'm happy to learn.

Cheers,
Richard