[asterisk-biz] case study on switching to Asterisk

[Byron Pile]

I thought the biz list was most appropriate for this. Hope I'm not wrong!I'm trying to write a term paper on adopting an open source solution over a commercial solution and comparing the cost. Specifically if a legacy system is in use already,  when will the initial
investment of hardware for an asterisk based system  pay off
against the licensing fees of a proprietary system. After reading a good chunk of the free Asterisk book "Asterisk:The Future of Telephony" I think that Asterisk is an excellent topic for the paper. I'm new to telephony stuff so bear with me if my questions are a bit dumb, I've tried to do quite a bit of research and reading before posting to the mail lists.  So my idea was to use the fake company "whatever" and they have 15 telephones and are currently using a  Norstar ICS with 4 incoming lines and 15 internal lines and I would like to switch this over to an asterisk based system.The reason for choosing the Norstar as this is a turnkey solution provided by a large local telecom so I will be able to get some pricing information for them fairly easily and I think it does what a 15 telephone small office might need...I'm open to a better suggestion if the Norstar is a poor choice.My quick questions are...is it possible that the handsets being used with a Norstar could be converted and used with the Asterisk system? (a bit of asset recovery)A system consisting of a suitable linux server running Asterisk and a Digium TDM2441B PCI Card  16FXS / 4FXO  would be a suitable replacement and could deliver the same performance/functions as the Norstar system?I'm going to try and be as thorough as possible in assessing the costs in switching to this system. The most obvious being some new hardware, but also, downtime, training, support costs, contract penalties (if there are any) etc....But this is a term paper and a highly hypothetical situation. And I know my questions are a bit general, but the paper will probably be kept quite general. I hope I can learn more about this cool app!Thanks!
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