Asterisk switchboard without VOIP, hows the qaulity

[Sapphiron]

Hi All

Our 8 year old LG switchboard is starting to give us problems.
We are a small business with about 40 extentions and 25 people.

We are investigating rather using a Asterisk based switchboard instead of a proprietary vendor one. We love the enterprise class feature set. ie VOice recording, Voice mailboxes etc

We have got multiple quotes from multiple vendors. We particularly like the one offer that inlcudes a SLA and 24/7 support service. Price is about the same as a midrange PABX from the Hymax or Samsung.

I see many companies with Asterisk sufering from bad line quality. I suspect this is due to the low quality broadband used to reduce costs.

We plan not not make use of any VOIP circuits untill the broadband situation improves. We plan to stick with our BRI's.

What have your experiences been when good qaulity Digium Asterisk equipment is used and sticking with BRI lines?

 

[erasma]

Make sure you lan is VOIP Ready with some QOS - that is most important!

there should be no difference in voice quality using the new system to the old with BRI's

 

[Sapphiron]

Make sure you lan is VOIP Ready with some QOS - that is most important!

there should be no difference in voice quality using the new system to the old with BRI's

On the local lan we plan to deploy 24 port 100MBit swithces with dual Gigabit uplinks to a central full gigabit switch. Thus ensuring that each port gets a near a near dedicated 100Mbit to it. They would typically be "web smart switches" where we can prioritize traffic on certain ports. The main 24 port gigabit switch would of course prioritize traffic to the port connected to the Asterisk server.

Would we still need QOS on that type of setup?

 

[savage]

IMHO - QOS is a must! Packet loss on voice = terrible.
IMHO - *HARDWARE* Echo Cancellation boards, that is switched on, configured, and working.
IMHO - Properly configured sip.conf and appropriate extensions.

The rest should be plain sailing...

 

[gmza]

Most important of all: get good VoIP phones! People underestimate how much of the quality is influenced by the handset.

Given your LAN and switching infrastructure is already pretty good, there is no real need for QoS on the LAN. You're not going to get packet loss (or even latency) when your links are 100Mb/s full-duplex and cross-links are GigE.

For switchboard installations your size I recommend Snom phones. There are also some really nice new entry-level Cisco phones (SPA50x/525) that bridge the gap between the LinkSys (SPA9xx) and high-end Ciscos (7940/7960). Cisco stock can be tricky though, whereas Snom is plentiful. Many use Polycom as well; IMO they are excessively expensive versus Snom with no real advantage.

Do not use soft-phones. Do not use cheap nasty phones.

Stick with ISDN BRI as you already have. Avoid analogue lines like the plague. Asterisk does handle them better then most, but levels (volume) can be tricky, whereas ISDN is flawless.

And as already mentioned by someone else, ensure you have hardware echo cancellation.

 

[imel]

I can second that. We use an asterisk server over BRIs inhouse, connecting via a Diguim interface card.
Call quality is great when using SNOM handsets, but there is a noticable difference when using "cheaper" handsets like Atcom, Budgetone, etc.
I would definately suggest sticking to SNOM handsets ,Digium cards and BRI lines.