asterisk users - Oct 2007 - Best cheap card to use for home Asterisk system???

Hi all -

 

I'm building an Asterisk system (Trix2.2) for the house-

 

I'd like to do the following things:

 

I have a single phone line (happens to be Charter Communications VOIP,
but I have their ATA and they've connected to red/green pair in the
house wiring)

 

What I'd like to do is this:

 

Get some low-end but reliable card/external adapter which would connect
to their ATA and tie into Asterisk to take calls and faxes

I'm assuming this should be something with one FXO and one FXS port to
connect the incoming line to and to connect the red/green wiring in the
house to.

 

I don't mind if all the house phones ring at one time for the moment, as
line 2 on them are the Asterisk extensions.

 

 

Whatever I use must also have failover capability, such that when
Asterisk is not working right (server down completely OR just not
responding) 

then the unit fails over and cross connects and makes things work just
as is normally the case with Charter only.

 

 

Unfortunately, I don't have a budget of hundreds of dollars for a true
Digium multiport card -

 

I've already built out Asterisk and have a Cisco ATA supporting line 2
on a couple of cordless phones,

but I'd like to have the failover piece so that if * starts failing, the
home phones still work..

 

Thanks, Tim

 

 

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Tim Reimers wrote:
> I have a single phone line (happens to be Charter Communications VOIP, 
> but I have their ATA and they?ve connected to red/green pair in the 
> house wiring)
Ok. so they've installed an ATA which connects your analog phones to 
their VoIP (perhaps SIP) service.
> What I?d like to do is this:
> 
> Get some low-end but reliable card/external adapter which would connect 
> to their ATA and tie into Asterisk to take calls and faxes
OK.  Since we've established above that Charter's service is VoIP 
converted to analog, AND since Asterisk isn't really designed to work 
with fax over IP it is safe to say that it's not worth the effort to 
attempt to get this to work.  I have relatives who have Time Warner's 
offering and even a stand alone fax machine will not work reliably over 
their "internet phone" service.  Hell the audio quality is crap most
of
the time.
> I?m assuming this should be something with one FXO and one FXS port to 
> connect the incoming line to and to connect the red/green wiring in the 
> house to.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Canadian television show that 
is popular on PBS in the US, but this sounds alot like the guy on the 
Red Green Show using duct tape to fix things.  If you really want to use 
Asterisk, you'd be better off getting an account with a SIP provider and 
using an FXS adapter to feed "line 2" on your phones similar to what 
Charter is doing with line 1.  Linksys makes a decent adapter which 
would suit this purpose.

Good luck!

Darrick
-- 
Darrick Hartman
DJH Solutions, LLC
http://www.djhsolutions.com