Several sites, about 40 extensions total, low power box

Together with a colleague, we've installed 4-5 Trixbox systems, starting with A@H 2 yrs ago. They've been in a range of situations from small dental office, to 2 linked offices with ~15 extensions each.

We've taken a slightly different approach from others because we used a low-power fanless box for the majority of installations. Our motivation was largely reliability (less moving parts), longer runtime on UPS and quiet running. Specifics of gear we've used is:

$350 http://www.logicsupply.com/products/sys7677 - though we ended up getting the mobo and case separately and adding our own HD and RAM, per below

$80 http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/servers/barracuda_es/ - the '24x7 server' series SATA drive

$400 http://www.netgear.com/Products/Switches/SmartSwitches/FS728TP.as... - 24 port PoE switch (all ports powered), or

$110 http://www.netgear.com/Products/Switches/DesktopSwitches/FS108P.a... - 8 port, 4 powered PoE Switch

$350 http://www.apc.com/resource/include/techspec_index.cfm?base_sku=S... - UPS that provides 3-4 hrs runtime for PBX + 10-15 PoE phones

$500 Sangoma 210001D - Sangoma echo cancelling analog card with 2 FXO ports (costs more than the computer(!!) but we've never had problems with analog lines - none that we could blame on the Sangoma anyway :-) )

$80 Grandstream 2000 - not perfect, but well priced and easy setup / nice features with Trixbox, including BLF, extension assignment to softkeys, etc

$110 Polycom 320 - our current favorite phone, esp with a PoE switch. Audio quality is noticeably better than Grandstream, esp speaker phone

Vitelity - we get mild echo on 10-20% of calls in Northern CA, but very reliable. We use VoipStreet as a backup - but we may reverse these to kill the echo now that VoipStreet is apparently more reliable. Elsewhere Vitelity has been fine. Telasip has also been excellent, but is more expensive these days than formerly.

$300 - Soekris 4501 / 4801 running m0n0wall as a front end firewall / traffic shaper / vpn gateway etc

Random comments:

* G729 licenses are worth the investment, and almost required with Polycom phones (as they don't support GSM like Grandstream does) unless you have a nice internet feed

* Asterisk codec handling is lame lame lame. We want U-Law internally and G729 when originating or terminating outside. And although the phones will happily do it, Asterisk can't do the match up in a way that avoids needless transcoding - which we don't want to do given our lower powered CPU. So we end up with G729 everywhere to save bandwidth - but that killed using SpeeX between offices due to double transcoding with the slow CPU

* we're using standard DSL or Cable internet at all locations - not expensive symmetrical lines and it works well enough, esp with shaping in m0n0wall

* one install cut the monthly phone bill from $700/mth to approx $200/mth (they still have incoming POTS for the main numbers with fwd-on-busy to a (voip) DID). We're still finding overbilling on the att account(s) for that! Another is regularly saving $150/mth in a small 5 extension office

* getting SpeeX going between two offices resulted in noticeably better audio than GSM for about the same bandwidth (once we tweaked settings)

* we always keep at least one pstn/pots line for the main incoming number. This helps with things like yellow page listings, 911 service (and is a good backup when everything else goes south! which got well tested in one install where att couldn't keep the DSL alive and we had to switch to cable)

Hope this helps someone!

cheers, michael