I'm looking at a new sister company we just took over, their remote village has 1700 analogue phone lines to the workers huts, but they go nowhere past the MDF. The office runs voip, now i'm told i have to get phones to the workers because the <lots of explicit words> AKA previous owners of that business stopped the build when they ran into financial problems. So my plan is to utilize the existing many miles worth of copper pairs. I'm looking at throwing them into Versa Dslams that use pppoe pass through, throw in a mikoTik 1036 as pppoe server, and we got spare R710 i can use as radius server, and by my limited knowledge this works. OK data done, but... now all those pots out lines need to go somewhere that can handle 1700 or more lines, I am looking at either grandstream 48 port FXS gateways or sangoma vega 50 ports (which Ill use as 48 so theres a 1:1 match with dslams) the vega 3050 probably wont be used because they are more than twice the price of grandstream. But this all results in a sh1te load of 48 port gateways (power is not a concern), but wondering if there is another solution that is more cost effective? Seems the regular NEC's Siemens and so on might have an option but I can imagine it will be far more expensive than a bunch of individual gateways. This project is in my mind workable, but i've not done such a thing on a large scale. Those who have experience in this field care to chime in? is my method acceptable or not for such a project size? most pbx's I've done are only few hundred analogue lines where gateways are more suited and definitely more cost effective, at all our locations we use freepbx which works perfectly, and we know the beefyness of the box we'll need to install to handle this load, thats not a problem if we go down the gateway method. thoughts?