SIP in higher education

["Art Gaylord" <>]

The maximum number of callers in an Asterisk MeetMe conference call is going 
to be limited primarily by the CPU of the server or the number of incoming 
lines to the extent callers are using the PSTN.  There will also be some 
dependency upon the mixture of voice codecs being used since transcoding is 
done by the server.

We have done test conference calls with over 25 participants with no obvious 
degradation of response or voice quality.  We've done  a number of  caller 
configurations ranging from all SIP based calls to mostly traditional phones 
(PSTN and/or Nortel PBX) with no major difference.   The CPU loading on our 
server (a dual Xeon processor Dell system) was under 10%.   We hit the limit 
of  people to participate in the testing well before the limit of the 
system.

We've also had multiple MeetMe conference calls going without problems. 
This was part of normal operations and not a controlled test so I don't know 
the details of the number of people involved in each call.

Art
_________________

Arthur S. Gaylord
Director, Computer and Information Services
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole MA 02543


508-289-3329