[Asterisk-Users] Minimum budget question ...

[Steven Critchfield]

On Mon, 2003-06-30 at 06:14, Stefano Corsi wrote:
> >    To connect four analog phones to an Asterisk server, you would need
> > the TDM400P, made by Digium.  That card is available for $305.00
> > (USD) and details can be found on
> > http://www.digium.com/?menu=wildcard_tdm400p  .
> 
> What about five analog phones, or let's say, eleven? It's just a matter of 
> putting 2 or more TDM400P together or there is some card that handles higher 
> number of phones?

Minimum budget usually screws you for future expandability. If you buy a
3 cylinder car for less than a full size car you can't go towing a
moving trailer.

If you for see the growth later on to need 11 phones you may quickly be
on the look out to change base technologies to a T1 interface and
channel bank(s).

Currently to get 11 analog phones on a system with the analog boards you
would be using 3 4 port TDM400 cards at $305 each. So $915. If you don't
mind using ebay for the channel bank, you can occasionally find a good
one that goes under $400, and you add on the $500 T100P card and have 24
phones as a possibility. 

Of course if you have 11 phones, you probably have nearing 6-8 lines and
need to start thinking of when you will need to switch to T1 from the
Telco to cut the cost of all those analog circuits and to get the added
benefit of the DIDs and other T1 call features. So you would then be
looking at either adding another $500 T100P card, or you could have went
ahead and bought the $1500 card in the beginning and have enough ports
and channels in your machine to take you past where your company will
expand in the next couple of years.

I don't think there is yet a real market for used Digium equipment and
so I'm not sure how well your hardware will resell when you want to
upgrade. 

-- 
Steven Critchfield  <critch at basesys.com>