[Asterisk-Users] S100I - competitive price?

[Kevin P. Fleming]

Matthew Boehm wrote:

> If it costs less for me to buy an adtran and another asterisk box to handle
> the encoding/decoding of that adtran, then there is no point to buying an
> S240I.

That may be true in some very specific cases, but I can think of lots of 
reasons why an Ethernet-connected "channel bank" would be a better 
alternative:

1) distributed transcoding (more channels on the same Asterisk server)
2) no slot limitation (or interrupt limitation) on the host
3) flexibility to put the channel bank (or banks) at different locations 
within the building using the existing network

Then again, you've changed your story a bit here... now you are saying 
"an adtran and another asterisk box"... that's very different from 
saying that any future S240I has to be cheaper than a used channel bank 
alone, which was your first proposition.

Realistically, how cheaply can you put together a box with a T-1 card 
and a channel bank with 24FXS ports (even disregarding G.729 
transcoding, which would add to the cost)? $700? $800? more? I can't say 
for sure, but if you wanted to use a decent speed machine, I'd expect 
that the PC+TE110P+channel bank solution would cost at least $900, and 
that's using a bargain-basement PC  and a used channel bank.