Hi Everyone, I'm new to asterisk and trying to get together the hardware to run a few POTS phone extentions and one or two POTS lines for starters. For these low port counts, I could just go with FXS and FXO cards, but... I can get a Cisco MC3810 with a mixture of FXO and FXS ports, the MC3810 comes with a built in ethernet port and I believe it does SIP too... Will this mean that I won't need a T1 card and dedicated channel bank? ie. Asterisk connected over ethernet with the MC3810 and the POTS lines and stations connected to the MC3810? Does it work that way? Any other limitations or gotcha's with this approach? (I'm new to this and want to confirm before I go too far down this path...) I found a couple of posts in the archive, but I wasn't sure if they were using a T1 card in the MC3810 or not. Thanks, -- Wayde Nie.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Monday 02 August 2004 11:09 am, Wayde Nie wrote:> Hi Everyone, > > I'm new to asterisk and trying to get together the hardware to run a few > POTS phone extentions and one or two POTS lines for starters. For these low > port counts, I could just go with FXS and FXO cards, but... > > I can get a Cisco MC3810 with a mixture of FXO and FXS ports, the MC3810 > comes with a built in ethernet port and I believe it does SIP too... > > Will this mean that I won't need a T1 card and dedicated channel bank? ie. > Asterisk connected over ethernet with the MC3810 and the POTS lines and > stations connected to the MC3810? Does it work that way? Any other > limitations or gotcha's with this approach? (I'm new to this and want to > confirm before I go too far down this path...) > > I found a couple of posts in the archive, but I wasn't sure if they were > using a T1 card in the MC3810 or not. > > Thanks, > -- > Wayde Nie.It's really kinda silly to have a great box like Asterisk and not use VoIP with it. Whenever you use a VoIP phone all you need is the network connection. That is the best way of using Asterisk. There's a good idea to have a Digium card as some Asterisk functions require a clock signal, from one of their cards. You can always use s/w to generate the clock but h/w is more solid. - -- Steve "They that would give up essential liberty for temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Benjamin Franklin -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFBDlwtljK16xgETzkRAq2fAKCnNOB0UxYlU42YmfbHSbmJI52zhACgw6jg qOO6gJsFH4DwJOAcZn2kVgU=NJte -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
Wayde Nie wrote:> I can get a Cisco MC3810 with a mixture of FXO and FXS ports, the MC3810 > comes with a built in Ethernet port and I believe it does SIP too... > > Will this mean that I won't need a T1 card and dedicated channel bank? ie. > Asterisk connected over Ethernet with the MC3810 and the POTS lines and > stations connected to the MC3810? Does it work that way? Any other > limitations or gotcha's with this approach? (I'm new to this and want to > confirm before I go too far down this path...)Hi Everyone, I sent a message with the above questions over this past weekend, unfortunately I had an email service outage and don't have the thread replies to respond to in order to maintain the discussion thread... I hope this gets threaded properly ;) , apologies for the confusion if it does not... In any case Steve Szmidt responded:> It's really kinda silly to have a great box like Asterisk and not use VoIP > with it. Whenever you use a VoIP phone all you need is the network > connection. That is the best way of using Asterisk.Maybe silly, but I have to do this with a stepped rollout approach... At first, I want to replicate what I have with POTS, except with separate extensions and other details but the "user interface", aka phone handsets, remains familiar... Next, I'd like to (slowly) add the "toys", IP phones, VoIP LD providers, etc...> There's a good idea to have a Digium card as some Asterisk functions require > a clock signal, from one of their cards.Does this mean that a digium card through the MC3810 T1 interface would provide the h/w clock whereas using Ethernet through the MC3810 10bT interface would require a less accurate s/w clock? Does anyone know if the MC3810 FXO/FXS ports are accessible through the built in Ethernet 10bT port (inferior s/w clock or not) or do you need to go in through the T1 interface? Has anyone actually done this? (I'm not really prepared to be a pioneer here ;) Grateful for any insights! Thanks, -- Wayde Nie.