My Company wants to upgrade our phone system(We are currently using an old 1990ish pc running PanaVoice 1.1 that nobody has the password for and will eventually fail leaving us without a Phone System.), rather than pay for some outrageous priced systems, I’m looking at a FreePBX setup. But haven’t been able find answers for what I need to know.
What would be recommended specs for a FreePBX server supplying up to 30+ phone lines.
What would be the then recommended VoIP gateway to serve that many Phones. Also would need to be able to clearly allow at least 4 outside lines concurrently. (I have seen many FreePBX videos of people using Cisco Gateways and Cisco phones for less line connections this would be optimal unless there are other gateways that do the same thing.)
I have looked at Cisco VoIP gateways but I don’t understand the specs enough to know what it is I exactly need any help would be greatly appreciated.
0. spend some time at http://wiki.freepbx.org/
1. google for "asterisk dimensioning"
2. Asterisk is in effect a voip gateway
3. and most importantly if you missed step 0 , spend some time at http://wiki.freepbx.org/ ;-)
Whether you missed step 0 or not, doing it twice (once as a start and once more after some of your other information gets filled in) certainly is an EXCELLENT idea.
You might also consider looking at “Asterisk Server Hardware” in Google.
FreePBX is now owned by Sangoma, which is a source of hardware that support Asterisk. There are lots of other sources as well. I would probably steer clear of the “General Purpose” hardware (like from Dell, for example) but that’s a personal opinion.
Like lots of other folks here, I sell hardware designed to be used as an Asterisk gateway. Because of that, if you ask any one individual, you are likely to get a perfectly reasonable answer.