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Hi guys,

I am currently using a beronet berofix (4x ISDN BRI) to dial out. For our final system we now have to decide on the dial out cards to be used. I'd like to get your experience with several cards including, but not limited to, the above mentioned ones.

Our goal is to get 96 dial out lines on one server (our dialer). In the end we want to have 2 of those resulting in 192 dial out lines. As far as I know it is possible to get 4x24 lines (4xE1 that is ISDN PRI, am I right?) working on a single card.
Only Sangoma and Aculab seem to offer more E1 trunks per card. Aculab gets up to 16 trunks on a card using daughter boards. Sangoma offers a 8 Port/trunks card, but I don't know how they do that on a PCI card, this isn't possible. Only four Ports fit on a standard PCI(e)-Board of normal size.

Which cards do you recommend? Please share your experiences. Thanks a lot in advance.

Cheers,
Marcus

Although this is defnitely a place for "lots of trunks", most of our rooms who use LOTS of lines (400+) do so purely with SIP trunking.

You may find that Asterisk user groups and forums have more information on this sort of topic with those specific cards, as there are A LOT more asterisk users than there are Vicidial users.

Trixbox, FreePBX, pure Asterisk ... all these have forums and support groups all over the world.

After that, find someone who sells this sort of hardware, and make them try to sell you based on what you just said. That usually causes the "fakes" to drop off and the real hardware guys to shine (and prove they have the equipment to sell you!)

marmu wrote:Hi guys,

I am currently using a beronet berofix (4x ISDN BRI) to dial out. For our final system we now have to decide on the dial out cards to be used. I'd like to get your experience with several cards including, but not limited to, the above mentioned ones.

Our goal is to get 96 dial out lines on one server (our dialer). In the end we want to have 2 of those resulting in 192 dial out lines. As far as I know it is possible to get 4x24 lines (4xE1 that is ISDN PRI, am I right?) working on a single card.
Only Sangoma and Aculab seem to offer more E1 trunks per card. Aculab gets up to 16 trunks on a card using daughter boards. Sangoma offers a 8 Port/trunks card, but I don't know how they do that on a PCI card, this isn't possible. Only four Ports fit on a standard PCI(e)-Board of normal size.

Which cards do you recommend? Please share your experiences. Thanks a lot in advance.

Cheers,
Marcus

Hello there!
First, E1 PRI is 30 channels, not 24. Are you in Europe?
Second, I would suggest you to use Sangoma, they're rock solid and their driver very well written.
But, for my experience, Digium, Sangoma, Beronet, OpenVox... they're all the same... and you want to go cheap, use openvox.

I heard about Dialogic, mainly used in commercial dialers (Siseco GAT, Geocall), and so on. They're very very very expensive, I don't know what is the difference, and if they're supported by Asterisk

@william: thanks for the info, you are right, there are several places to ask such kind of questions
what do you mean by

most of our rooms who use LOTS of lines (400+) do so purely with SIP trunking

do you mean they are not connected to T1/E1 and got SIP-Providers (VoIP-Providers) instead?

@DarknessBBB: Thanks for your post too. Yes, my fault. E1 is 30 channels and I am in Europe.

For now I would choose Sangoma. Beronet abstracts from the E1 line and doesn't need a special driver. All is masked, their card is installed as a Realtek NIC (8139). This is quite nice, but I don't know if that could cause some problems (for example performance) in the future. We are using beronets berofix with max. 4 ISDN-BRI-Channels at the moment.

I heard about Dialogic, mainly used in commercial dialers (Siseco GAT, Geocall), and so on. They're very very very expensive, I don't know what is the difference, and if they're supported by Asterisk

Dialogic is arguably the best hardware for this purpose on the market. However, they are not supported by asterisk. And they charge WAAAAYYY too much, and all the software that runs dialogic hardware is pretty much proprietary, once again adding an extremely expensive layer to the system.

that being said: they may be the best, but they are NOT the only "decent sounding" system. Pretty much all the hardware manufacturers that support (have drivers available for) asterisk are now capable of sound quality close to (if not sometimes identical to) dialogic. It's just that every dialogic system I ever touched always had perfect sound quality (If a board fried, it didn't work any more ... but the sound quality was never, ever, an issue).

marmu wrote:what do you mean by

most of our rooms who use LOTS of lines (400+) do so purely with SIP trunking

do you mean they are not connected to T1/E1 and got SIP-Providers (VoIP-Providers) instead?

Yep. And most do not use any telephony hardware at all, ztdummy or dahdidummy for the timing source, and LOTS of sip or iax trunks.

Hi guys,

just wanted to update you. Beronet also offers a boxed version of their berofix which sounds quite interesting. You don't have to plug any card into your server, but connect the berofix-box via LAN. Every box acts as a VoIP-provider. I think this is a good solution due to scaleability, redundancy and maintenance.

What do you think? Any experience with similar solutions?

Cheers,
Marcus

marmu wrote:Hi guys,

just wanted to update you. Beronet also offers a boxed version of their berofix which sounds quite interesting. You don't have to plug any card into your server, but connect the berofix-box via LAN. Every box acts as a VoIP-provider. I think this is a good solution due to scaleability, redundancy and maintenance.

What do you think? Any experience with similar solutions?

Cheers,
Marcus

At this point I suggest you to consider the rock-solid Patton Gateways

I just checked the patton gateways. as many other (more professional?) solutions, like aculab, dialogic, sangoma and digium, they are quite expensive.
berofix seems to offer more value for money. I don't think that we will benefit from any of the extra features patton and the others offer.
please warn me if I am wrong. Perhaps I am missing something, that is quite essential or a feature I can't see any value in for our purposes.

there are several solutions to provide a trunk locally on LAN by converting the trunk to SIP so asterisk can get to it via ULAW with good quality. I have not yet found one of those solutions to be "Bad".

That being said: I also have not found one to be inexpensive or useful in any way other than bypassing a bad internet provider

if you cannot get NET, you cannot get SIP, so if you need phone lines into a Vicidial system, you must have some sort of hardware ... these types of solutions are very good at bridging that gap.

Then it comes down to cost per trunk for hardware ... and cost per minute for the type of service.

I actually have a few clients who have opted for a colocated Vicidial server accessed through multiple DSL accounts to avoid such things (the DSL accounts are cheap and reliable enough for the agents to communicate with Vicidial ... and then Vicidial can have a huge circuit because it's colocated, and the Full Power of the Vicidial system can be achieved ).

we decided to stick with beronet. they got a good value for their price, further they are from germany and support is also in german.

soon we will install our first "big" server and connect it to up to 128 lines, 24 analog phones via grandstream gxw VoIP gateway, sooooo excited