alternative to voip gateways

Sat May 2 04:20:40 UTC 2020

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?