At 02:11 PM 9/2/2009, you wrote: >That said, is there any way technologically to branch/bridge a >normal phone line using Asterisk (or anything else), or must I have >some other number/service coming in? > >Also, I believe there was a bit of confusion with an earlier >post. Although they wish to *host* the entire setup in-house, they >will have external callers. > >I'm certainly not opposed to the various proposed solutions, but >given the nature of the project you can understand that I don't want >to spend resources on items they don't absolutely need.
I think if you have the upstream bandwidth that you could get a single number from a VOIP provider, I pay $1.50/month or so from Flowroute, and pay about a penny per minute for each active connection. I've found they tend to severely limit the number of concurrent connections, I think I'm only allowed 2 or 4, but I think that's mainly a protection from fraud thing and that a bit of negotiation could get that limit raised to meet your needs. That means for 20 callers you're looking at an internet connection with adequate bandwidth, a asterisk box, I'd guess most any reasonable leftover computer made in the last 4 years would work and then it's 25 cents a minute for however long the conferences last. If you do that, you can get in for essentially 0 hardware cost and it's easy to set up and test for a $30 up front payment for a few thousand minutes. Which makes lots of sense if the number of conference minutes is small, if that number gets high, you might see if a T1 is cheaper as you might get that with free incoming minutes. The T1 card will increase the hardware cost quite a bit. The part I don't know and maybe someone else can help is how to get your conference sound track into Asterisk. Ira _______________________________________________ -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- AstriCon 2009 - October 13 - 15 Phoenix, Arizona Register Now: http://www.astricon.net asterisk-users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
