looking for a decent 4 port FXS

lotas

Morning all.

After some foolish decisions, we now have 2 150Mb Cable modems, each with a phone line and a 70Mb PSTN/Fiber connection, also with a phone line...

I have been tasked with setting something up so that we can make calls with the PSTN line (since its giving us unlimited calls to mobiles and landlines) but also allow the 2 cable modem to work also...

I am thinking of getting a PSTN -> SIP adapter (had an old linksys one with 1 port a while back) but looking for something that has 4 FXS ports (have figured thats what the line from the provider is called) and 2-4 FXO (internal lines, right?) ports...

Any recommendations? anywhere i should buy these? checked Amazon, got lost... checked EBay, got even more lost... HELP!!!

Mr. G

The wall plug is FXS (gives dial tone) and the phone is FXO. So for the gateway you want a 4 port FXO if you want to send traditional calls over sip.

http://www.3cx.com/faqs/fxs-fxo/

Have a look for a cisco spa400 and the likes, that does 4 fxo.

lotas

cool. thanks. looks like the SPA400 is what i want alright...

MLC61

Do you have that back to front?
I understood you were looking to route the calls over the PSTN to avail of the free calls that you have on them? The gateway you are looking at will translate SIP to PSTN to allow you to link a SIP trunk to a PBX.
What you require is a mini PBX to connect to PSTN and give you 4 handsets.
A number of gateways similar to this Cisco one will do that but I do not think that they will route calls over PSTN.
Perhaps try Vega.

Mr. G

If you want to make calls over the pstn you need an FXO adapter as this does not generate a dial tone, it uses dial tone from the exchange. The FXO adapter can make calls over the PSTN line.

FXO – Foreign eXchange Office interface is the port that receives the analog line.

Confusing I know..

lotas

MLC61 wrote: »

I understood you were looking to route the calls over the PSTN to avail of the free calls that you have on them? The gateway you are looking at will translate SIP to PSTN to allow you to link a SIP trunk to a PBX.

yea, thats what i am looking for...

after reading Mr. G's comment again, I am looking for something that will give me 4 FXS ports (for the incoming and outgoing lines) and X number of FXO (in my case, 2 will probably do). I just got a PAP2T and 2 Grandstream HandyTone 702, which I now realize are the wrong ones... A**E! Now to spend more money on the VOIP setup in the house...

MLC61 wrote: »

Perhaps try Vega.

Whats Vega?

Mr. G

FXS is for internal extensions. FXO is for external lines.

The PAP2T are for internal extensions, it has 2 FXS ports on it.

If you want to connect to pstn you need FXO.

I think there's a bit of confusion. The actual wall socket port is FXS, to connect to this you need an FXO adapter. I hope this makes sense?

MLC61

I think you are getting too hung up on FXS and FXO.
He wants to connect to PSTN lines and route calls in and out over them, I believe? No need for SIP.
He wants to have a couple of handsets working off these two lines, I believe?
You could just use 2 cordless phones.

Mr. G

OP what's your setup and what exactly do you want to achieve?

lotas

right. Setup is as follows:

3 PSTN phone lines, one with unlimited calls to both irish land lines and mobiles, the other with "some" calls.
I would like to setup the system to allow a phone (or group of phones) to ring when a call comes though *ANY* of the PSTN lines. I would also like to route calls over that PSTN line with the unlimited calling.
VOIP and SIP stuff would be a bonus (though, given the fact most of our calls can be free, i am not sure what bonus).

Mr. G

What sort of phone system do you have?

lotas

dont have one at the moment, but looking at building out an Asterisk system using Raspberry Pi and a newly purchased SPA400.... Also got a PAP2T... should be able to cobble something together...

Mr. G

lotas wrote: »

dont have one at the moment, but looking at building out an Asterisk system using Raspberry Pi and a newly purchased SPA400.... Also got a PAP2T... should be able to cobble something together...

The raspberry pi works surprisingly well with asterisk. I have one with asterisk and haven't had any problems. CPU usage is at 2% normally so it can facilitate enough calls for you anyway. Try and get a large enough quality SD card though because the actual packages are on an SD card, and it will hold voicemails etc. On that by default. This is what I've installed:

http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org/

The freepbx gui is a bit slow but if you get stuck just shout.

Mylow

Mr. G wrote: »

The raspberry pi works surprisingly well with asterisk. I have one with asterisk and haven't had any problems. CPU usage is at 2% normally so it can facilitate enough calls for you anyway. Try and get a large enough quality SD card though because the actual packages are on an SD card, and it will hold voicemails etc. On that by default. This is what I've installed:

http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org/

The freepbx gui is a bit slow but if you get stuck just shout.

Just took a look at the site mentioned, is there no end to what the raspberry Pi can do. The latest feature is particularly interesting, it allows direct calling on GSM/3G networks with USB modems from Huawei and the chan_dongle channel driver.

Looks like I will be trying this out.

lotas

yup. that chan_dongle thing looks interesting... if you had someone in the UK or US (or anywhere) with a decient internet connection and some spare power, a raspberry pi, an unlocked 3g dongle and a sim card from a random network in the country and you have yourself a virtual office with a <insert country> mobile. very cool stuff indeed! I like the fact that chan_dongle can also work with SMS messages!

Mr. G

It won't do for anything more then a small office really though. You can get a case on ebay for it so it doesn't get dusty or damaged.

Haven't had problems and its been up for weeks without a reboot needed. I use putty to manage it remotely (instead of the HDMI cable) so it doesn't need a screen.

lotas

yea, the Pi is a very nice little box... got a couple in the house and one in a Co-Lo facility somewhere... cant really go wrong with them!

MLC61

Does it take the PSTN lines that were the object of your original enquiry?

lotas

MLC61 wrote: »

Does it take the PSTN lines that were the object of your original enquiry?

if used directly with the cisco spa400, it will. all incoming calls from the SPA400 are redirected to asterisk on the Pi, and the Pi does the magic... in reality, i could probably just use a SPA400 and the PAP2T, but where is the fun in that?!