Well being that this is what I do I guess I will pipe up. Asterisk should be fine but you may also want to search for Freeswitch. If you dont know asterisk and have to learn anyway Freeswitch may be a good option. If you want the most painless entry in to Asterisk you will want to use a pre-made distro. We use Druid here in the office but there are other options like Elastix, PBX in a Flash, and trixbox. As was mentioned almost any off the shelf PC will do ok. If you will be running hardware telephony interfaces I would avoid the throw away boards as the cards are high interrupt devices and some really cheap main boards simply cant handle it. For something your size you can probably get away with an Atom board. Having all your stations as sip should be ok but this should be an Isolated network so when a few people stream youtube the calls dont degrade. As far as additional hardware goes you havent provided enough data. Do you have pots lines, a T1, Voip? How many lines are coming in? If you need to terminate to the pstn best advice is DON'T BE CHEAP. Using cheap cards will make your job harder as they are not often professionally supported and can lead to a project being scrapped for being junk. I would hope you buy Rhino (http://rhinoequipment.com) as they are 1. Where I work. 2. Made in the US. 3. An Arizona company. That said you have other choices and I would stick to Rhino or one of these other two if you want your stuff to work: Digium (http://digium.com) or Sangoma ( http://sangoma.com) Note Sangoma is a Canadian company if that matters. Our company and these other two provide installation support of the hardware and back what they sell. The card(s) you need will depend on the manufacturer and the interfacing. If you want to email me privately we can hash out more specific details of what you need for your environment. Regards, -- James Finstrom Rhino Equipment Corp. http://rhinoequipment.com ~ http://postug.com Phone: 1-877-RHINO-T1 ~ FAX: +1 (480) 961-1826 Twitter: http://twitter.com/rhinoequipment IP: guest@asterisk.rhinoequipment.com On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 9:19 PM, Kevin Brown wrote: > I'm trying to spec out a PBX or similar system for a startup company. The > requirements for such a system would be 10-15 phones (either analog or > digital phones), 1 or 2 fax lines (obviously analog) and voicemail for same, > as well as the recommended link to the outside world. Mostly I'm trying to > figure out about how much this would cost with setup as part of a > presentation. Unfortunately I can't give out a whole lot of information as I > haven't been able to get any of my questions answered (this was dumped on me > today and wanted by Wed. morning along with servers, switches, Internet > access, etc...). > > Not looking for sales pitches, but wouldn't object to responses from local > vendors, heheh. > --------------------------------------------------- > PLUG-discuss mailing list - PLUG-discuss@lists.plug.phoenix.az.us > To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: > http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss >