[Asterisk-Users] Softswitch

[Darren Martz]

Pardon my ignorance, but I was hoping someone could clear up something for
me.

- For a few POTS lines, digium has a single port card for that, or a T1 card
to a channel bank.
- For 10 or more lines, digium has a T1 or E1 card for that too based on PRI
channels
- For 100's to 1000's of lines, I suspect a soft-switch is in order???

A traditional phone company will sell:
- POTS lines for small quantities
- PRI channels over one or more T1 lines
- ??? for 100's to 1000's of lines???

Unlike PRI channels, we are all able to get better than 64k using a variety
of different codecs. So how is it possible to get more out of a link/bridge
(pardon my lack of proper technical terms) to the public phone systems?? If
a codec can drop a channel down to 8k, then a single T1 should be capable of
supporting nearly 184 concurrent calls right??

I suspect this is where a softswitch comes in, but it is not clear to me. Do
you call up a phone company and ask for a block of T1's using SS7
signalling, or MGCP, and plug it into a softswitch?? If that is even
partialy correct, does that decrease the cost (HERE IS THE KEY) for access
to public lines? I'm sure the softswitch (again assuming I'm partially
right) costs around $100k.

Asterisks shows support for MGCP channels, does that help in this fuzzy
scenario?

Perhaps I am way off, but I do hope someone can clarify some of these things
for me, or at least get a laugh at my quesions and wording <grin>

Cheer,
Darren