Telephony hardware (was xAP quiet?)

["Patrick Lidstone \(Personal E-mail\)" <patrick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>
> I suppose the big question for me is what telephony hardware
> do I need? I have one BT analogue line with ADSL and a home
> highway line with 2 x analogue numbers off of the digital number.
>

For the ISDN digital line: Fritz AVM ISDN card (aka BT Speedtouch ISDN
card). Can be had off e-bay for around 20 notes. Use the CAPI driver.

For the direct exchange analogue line: Sipura 3000

For ISDN analogue ports: Either upgrade to ISDN2e or Business Highway, and
renumber your analogue ports as digital circuit MSN's (all of which is a
relatively expensive process), or buy a further pair of Sipura 3000's, one
for each analogue port. Also worth mentioning, you won't get caller id on
the digital circuit unless you ugrade to ISDN2e or Business Highway - BT
refuse to supply it on homehighway.

Digium are working on fixing the issues with running a TDM400 on UK
analogue
circuits. Once this is done, it's likely that the TDM400 with 3 FXO modules
would be an adequate/more cost effective solution.

If you want to use existing analogue handsets, you can plug them into the
FXS port on the Sipura 3000, or you can buy a TDM400 configured with up to
four FXS modules. Alternatively you can replace the analogue handsets with
IP phones. Either route will support caller id display on the analogue
handsets. If you go for IP phones I'd recommend avoiding budget IP phones -
go with Cisco 79xx, Snom or Polycom. The Cisco 79xx are particularly nice.
The have a built in simple browser, which you can use to access your own
internal services (HA, weather, phone books etc).

Sipura 3000's are available from linitx.com / voiptalk.org
Snoms are available from provu.co.uk
Cisco 79xx are available from ebuyer.co.uk
I don't know of a UK supplier for polycom phones.
TDM400's are available telappliant.co.uk / voiptalk.org or direct from
digium.com, but import duty makes them virtually the same price anyway.

HTH

Patrick