There isn't a UK supplier at the moment (as far as I can tell), but I am
contemplating being a UK supplier and getting a CE mark for them (which
is actually not as hard as it sounds). Asterisk consultancy is one of
the things we want to provide through The Open Learning Centre, and
having a hardware box is a lot easier to market than a service, we would
probably not make much on the boxes, we are interested in the services
that could go along with it. My business partner Alan Lord has a
background in telephony and he gets quite excited about these devices.
The Oslec echo canceler is fantastic and the guy who wrote it, David
Rowe, is the guy behind this device. You should look at oslec
http://www.rowetel.com/ucasterisk/oslec.html whatever hardware you use,
it just deals with all echo and made a crappy £10 voice card sound
perfect. I think these make quite good Asterisk servers because they are
low power, low heat, no moving parts boxes which will just carry on
working plus it is a real Linux box that you can do other interesting
stuff with, your imagination (and 400Mhz/64Mb ram /256Mb storage) is the
limit.
The IP04 with 2 FXO and 2FXS costs $450 American Dollars so in real
money that is £225 plus shipping plus VAT plus any import duty etc. I
have no idea what we could get them for as a distributor. If there are a
bunch of folk who would be interested in one (or several) of these at a
price somewhere between £200 - £300 then I might bump this little
project up the todo list a bit.
Alan Bell
Paul Tansom wrote:
> ** Alan Bell <alan@???> [2008-01-24 06:32]:
>
>> Paul Tansom wrote:
>>
>>> I'm looking to finally put together an Asterisk box and was wondering
>>> whether anyone had any recommendations on reliable, but sensibly priced
>>> cards to use, and suppliers. I'm expecting to need 2 FXO and 2 FXS ports
>>> to start off with, not sure whether I'll need to up on that for my own
>>> setup as I'll probably look around for IP handsets rather than analogue
>>> ones if/when I add units.
>>>
>> take a look at these little units
>>
>> http://www.rowetel.com/ucasterisk/ip04.html
>>
> ** end quote [Alan Bell]
>
> They look interesting, and a bit like fun :) Now I have the delema of
> what route to take. My initial plan was to build a PC to do the job to
> get experience of doing it all. One of those little boxes would do the
> trick nicely for my own purposes though, and quite well priced compared
> to the cards. I'll have to follow some links to see about a UK supplier,
> I'm never too confident purchasing from abroad with issues of import tax
> and warranty.
>
>
--
Alan Bell
The Open Learning Centre
Web:
www.theopenlearningcentre.com
Mob: +44 (0)7736 778908
Tel: +44 (0)8444 849388
The Open Learning Centre is a trading name of Bell Lord Ltd,
a company registered in England and Wales #05868943.
VAT Registration #GB 901 4715 55
