How can Asterix PBX/IP be compared to vendors such as Avalla, Nortel.

How can Asterix PBX/IP be compared to vendors such as Avalla, Nortel,
Cisco, etc? How big Asterix PBX/IP can really grow as to the number of
users? voice quality? etc. Thanks for your insights

 

I'm not sure you can make a direct comparison at all, since Asterisk is just
software.

miguel

 

Isn't that how the whole industry is going though?
Cisco CallManager/Unity is purely software too.

 

There is virtually no limit to the number of users that can be supported
via Asterisk. That said, Asterisk's scalability is, beyond a certain
point, cumbersome. For organizations with the expertise to deal with
these issues, this is a trivial matter, more than offset by the dramatic
cost savings of this open-source solution.

Voice quality is dependent on a number of factors, but all of those
being equal, Asterisk will deliver voice quality as good as any other
system.

 

For organizations with the expertise to deal with

Personnel costs to deal with it may well be a hell of a lot more expensive
than commercial solutions. An oft-overlooked point when people start
blathering on about open source.

 

Asterisk is a software based solutions require skill in set up and
maintanence.
But the PBXs are made like commodity and needs minimum skill and
expertise to set up and maintanence.
As mentioned opensource require high tech support and it is costly. But
Asterisk offer features and facility far ahead of any PBX.
The scalability, quality etc,, are very good for Asterisk and only you
need to add more hardware resources.
The development in Asterisk going on for embedded linux etc to make the
system simple.

 

<sigh...>

What part of "For organizations with the expertise to deal with these
issues..." did you not get?

 

What part of "For organizations with the expertise to deal with these

I didn't miss the point at all. The level of experience needed to run a PBX
is quite a bit less than that needed to put up with the same thing cobbled
up on a linux box. All too often those interested in preaching about the
'savings' of things like open source fail to appreciate the entire range of
actual costs to the organization. Yes, a place that already has a PBX
expert on staff might well also be able to handle the added burden of
cobbling up a linux box. But I'd argue that's not common enough to make it
a better deal for most companies looking for a brainless-to-operate PBX that
just 'works'.

 

You are making a number of assumptions, after the fact, to justify your
position. Given those assumptions, your argument is valid. Nevertheless,
it remains true that, given staff of adequate skills, Asterisk can be
deployed in the PBX role at substantial savings over traditional
hardware.

Indeed, for the money I'd save over an Avaya system with similar
capabilites, I could train my PBX-boy or network admin to expert level
on Asterisk, or hire a consultant to do the work, and still have tens of
thousands of dollars left over.

"Just works" is my yardstick as well, when it comes to systems that are
as vital as telephony is to most organizations. Asterisk reached that
point some time ago. Set up on proper hardware, by someone who knows
what she's doing, it is easily the equal of anthing the traditional PBX
vendors have to offer, and exceeds them in many areas.

 

When he said "expertise in place", I think he meant someone who is both
Linux admin and PBX admin experienced. Which is likely to be rare.

 

John Nelson wrote:

<snip>

Well Avaya isn't exactly known for dollar value. Compare it against a
vendor with more reasonably priced stuff and your argument does not hold
up.

 

this depends on scale and complexity - simple setups are meant to be easy,
but like most other IT related systems, things get complicated and need more
care and attention as they get bigger.

i think this may actually be a key point.

FWIW - the "expensive" commercial systems such as Cisco call manager tend to
spend a big chunk of the total systems cost on end points and gateways. So
IP phones, or convertors to support existing analog handsets, and gateways
to access PSTN etc is where a lot of money ends up.

The high end softswitches used by PSTN providers are even more biased
towards peripheral costs as the individual modes scale up the number of end
points per system.

I cant see how having a "free" central call management piece can affect the
direct cost of the bits that use separate hardware to scale up.

again on call manager you can put gateways cards into the central processor
(or you could initially) - but this severely restricts the number of end
points, call setup rates and other scale limits.

to answer the original Q - last time i checked call manager could handle
37000 end points as a single logical PBX using a central server cluster

i cant see any reason that asterix cant go to similar scale with a similar
design- but if it did i would want a 2 or 4 hour fix support + maint
contract on it, design that would survive loss of any server etc - and i
think that might be hard to find for a non commercial product.

One of the advantages with something commercial like the cisco is that they
will provide a reference design, and commit to scaling rules, size limits
and so on.