Topic: Gateway or HA8 Card

[compsos]

Hi
We are looking at a system that will need to handle pstn and ISDN2 connections. Digium has just released a HA8 PCI card that has 8 ports and can take FXO, FXS and ISDN (BRI) cards in singles or quad. As far as I can find it has not arrived in Australia yet. So has anyone had experience of these cards? Or would it be better to use something like a Polygate gateway (or others) for the Telco trunks? I hear rumours that Telstra are backing out of the ISDN2 connections but have not been able to confirm this.

Ignore the ISDN closure. This is the official Telstra response.

Is Telstra shutting down ISDN?
No, we are simply exiting our pricing plans for the ISDN Home and BigPond ISDN products
from 31 December. Customers will still be able to use ISDN 2 Enhanced and BusinessLine
products with no change

[Franco]

I always choose the gateways over the internal cards!
You're better safer than sorry

[compsos]

So any recommendations on gateways?
Polygate
Epygi Quadro
Others
At this stage we appear to need possibly 2 gateways 1 ISDN and the other analogue. How well do they interface to each other or is just within the trunk definitions with them plugged into the LAN side?

[Franco]

So any recommendations on gateways?
Polygate
Epygi Quadro
Others

Hi Gordon,
I'm unfamiliar with both, what I have and works pretty good are Multitech.

At this stage we appear to need possibly 2 gateways 1 ISDN and the other analogue. How well do they interface to each other or is just within the trunk definitions with them plugged into the LAN side?

Right, Sail will take full control of the routes and how the clients will use them.

Best,

[compsos]

Thanks Franco

It seems the Multitech only lists FXO/FXS gateways. We also need digital (ISDN2) which is not used in the US from what I can find out. Mainly used in UK, EU, SA and Australasia.

Not having an external gateway in front of me, I can think of one card advantage with daughter boards is that a faults seems to kill the Daughter board and not the PCI card. The D card is easy and cheaper to change than a whole gateway. Is this thinking correct?

[Franco]

Hi Gordon,
Look at http://www.red-fone.com.

About the Daughter boards, that is true. I have lost a total of 03 of them in less than a year due to what I think is the voltage coming from the phone line, all FXO. But I never lost a gateway, and if I did, I wouldn't have to visit the client, open the machine and stop all the services and so on. Hence my preference for gateways and Channel Banks.

Things I can't do with gateways:
- Caller ID from the LDAP server. This is because gateways allow me to send the calls to predefined numbers, but not run custom apps.
- I ran into problems sending DTFM to certain types of media centers (Tivo, Xbox, etc.), where an FXS card sends fine.

[compsos]

Thanks Franco
Looked at their site but did not see any ISDN2 (BRI) type interfaces. Also no notes on Australian A tick that is required before connection to the Australian network.http://forums.contribs.org/Smileys/default/sad.gif
Looks like we may end up with 2 cards (1 digital BRI and the other 1 analogue). I have emailed Digium directly about the new HA8 card.

[SARK devs]

http://www.voipon.co.uk/voip-gateways-c-3.html

Pretty much all of the gateways you can currently buy on one page.

Kind Regards

S

[compsos]

Thanks Jeff
Had already found a few of those, but not many offer the hybrid of line types the HA8 card has. So it still seems the most cost effective for the mix of lines.
Do you think the card detection routines in Sail will handle the HA8 card? Also correct me if I am wrong but is the overall configuration/management of an internal card better than external gateways?

[SARK devs]

We have no experience with the HA8.  In Sail-2.4 and 2.5 we use the Digium-provided card detection routines, rather than our own.  As long as Digium have code in there to detect the new card then it should work.  You'll need to ask Digium which Asterisk/Dahdi release you need and you may need some patching from us when we look at how you need to address the HA8 from the dial plan.

Kind Regards

Jeff

[malcolmd]

Howdy,

The HX8 cards (HA8 and HB8) require DAHDI 2.3.0+ drivers.  The dahdi_genconf utility has been improved to support basic configuration of the card - though you'll probably want to set your signalling type manually in the generated /etc/asterisk/dahdi-channels.conf file as it defaults to point-to-multipoint instead of the more common point-to-point.

From the dialplan, the card is addressed the same as any other DAHDI-driver'd card - using the DAHDI technology type in the Dial application, etc.

Cheers.

Malcolm Davenport, Senior Product Manager
Digium, Inc.

[SARK devs]

Well,

You can't get a better response than that.



Best

S

[compsos]

Hi all
Thank you for the replies. I have also found from one of the Australian distributors that he holds an A tick for the card.

I think we will give it a go as it allows the greatest flexibility for the site.