** Alan Bell <alan@???> [2008-01-24 22:04]:
> 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.
> >
> 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.
** end quote [Alan Bell]
Interestingly the place Nick recommended [1] offers the Atcom versions
of these boxes. They are selling them for £290 +VAT with 4xFXO modules
They don't seem to have any flexibility with FXS modules. I need to read
up on what features of Asterisk would be lost by using a standard
handset via an FXS module, I'm a bit rusty on my reading as it is a
while back when I first planned to set up a box, but other things have
pushed the project onto the back burner.
[1]
http://www.ipchitchat.com/
--
Paul Tansom | Aptanet Ltd. |
http://www.aptanet.com/ | 023 9238 0001
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