[LINK] Asterisk Linux PABX

[r.polanskis at uws.edu.au]

On Tue, 21 Dec 2004, rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au wrote:

> For eg:
> - if you own the PABX already, why replace it? These things live a very
> long time. In particular, the IT life cycle is much, much shorter than
> the PABX cycle ... the hosting hardware may go out of manufacturer
> support in five years. Some PABX vendors can still run last week's
> software revision on systems launched in 1991 or 1992.

It's also a question of scalability.  A PABX is often driven by
an embedded OS and relies on various hardware to do it's switching.

Then there is the question of call accounting, timing the call
and being able to do things like conferencing and party line linkups
and so on.   A $10000 solution may well be able to all the above
but is it going to be able handle the peaks loads which could
even mean 5,000 calls an hour of varying duration?   I don't think
linux on the X86 platform can scale like that without the beefing up
of the architecture to where the TCO becomes almost equivalent
to a hardware solution with a software control interface.

Then, where are all the OSS billing systems?

Are you going to trust the contractors who currently come out and
do your PABX work to manage OK on the software based systems?

What happens if the computer crashes (and it will)?   PABX
systems rarely have critical "catch fire" situations and
their simplicity actually protects them from the
worst case scenarios as opposed to an evil X86 box that
has all sorts of moving, volatile components.


rachel

-- 
Rachel Polanskis		Systems Admin, University of Western Sydney
V1-37, Kingswood Campus		(+61 2) 47 360 291 <r.polanskis at uws.edu.au>
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