SUGGESTIONS FXS/FXO card

[ChicoCanada]

Good day all,

I am looking at building a PIAF server for my buddy's small business. He has 4 centrex lines, for which we'll have the features stripped down to a plain 1FL. I am looking at a used Dell server with 2 power supplies, 2 NICs and 4 HDDs in RAID5. I'm looking at around $200 for the server. He doesn't want to go pure VoIP end-to-end as he fears his WAN connectivity may go down.

Can someone please recommend which FXS/FXO card to go with? I have never bought one, configured one nor used one thus far. Anything I need to consider that I may not know about? Which PIAF flavour would be ideal? Does purple still support inbound Skype calls?

Cheers!

 

[atsak]

I would get a Sangoma Vega gateway, costs about the same a line card and is easier to configure frankly.

If you need to cheap out the Grandstream gateways are OK (sometimes have echo), and the Sangoma line cards are all fine. Rhino has been fine for me too.

 

[ChicoCanada]

Thanks a bunch to you both. So FXO interfaces with POTS lines and FXS interfaces with analog phones, right? Sangoma Vega 50 looks like a winner. So I connect the Vega 50 to the PIAF server via patch cord but I don't plug the phones into the Vega 50? Or does it fully interface PIAF for extensions? The Vega 50 has an ATA in each FXS that will auth with PIAF?

If I go the Grandstream route and have echo, can it be mitigated/resolved properly via software?

Cheers

 

[atsak]

Thanks a bunch to you both. So FXO interfaces with POTS lines and FXS interfaces with analog phones, right? Sangoma Vega 50 looks like a winner. So I connect the Vega 50 to the PIAF server via patch cord but I don't plug the phones into the Vega 50? Or does it fully interface PIAF for extensions? The Vega 50 has an ATA in each FXS that will auth with PIAF?

If I go the Grandstream route and have echo, can it be mitigated/resolved properly via software?

Cheers

The vega just sits on the same network as the PIAF server; no need to direct connect. It basically is configured like any old sip trunk on the asterisk side; you treat it like a trunk, then use the FXO ports one per analog / Bell line.

If you need analog phones you can also get FXS ports for inside your network, and you setup extensions that point to the channels, but that seems a bit unnecessary and annoying. Don't do that, get SIP phones.

No to the Grandstream question.

 

[ChicoCanada]

Cool, thanks a bunch to you both. I think I will use the existing analog phones and buy a few ATAs to register extensions straight to PIAF. Is there such thing as a multi-ATA? Instead of buying 6 ATAs, I could buy one multi-ATA and place it where the BIX is located and connect each RJ11 line directly to the multi-ATA instead of having an ATA at each phone.

Cheers

 

[atsak]

Cool, thanks a bunch to you both. I think I will use the existing analog phones and buy a few ATAs to register extensions straight to PIAF. Is there such thing as a multi-ATA? Instead of buying 6 ATAs, I could buy one multi-ATA and place it where the BIX is located and connect each RJ11 line directly to the multi-ATA instead of having an ATA at each phone.

Cheers

Yes, the Vega will do that for you (just get FXS and FXO ports) or there's FXS gateways from Grandstream, Obihai and Linksys (the SPA8000). They all run the risk of the same echo problems, so the Vega might be your best bet.

 

[ChicoCanada]

Sweet, cheers!