[Asterisk-bsd] ATA's

[Jeff LaCoursiere]

Hi,

Frequent lurker comes up for air.  TIA for any advice.

I am running Internet Cafes in the islands and am adding calling stations
for the cruise ship crew and passengers to use while visiting.  I already
have an asterisk server running a custom prepaid access card system we
wrote, and I have been using the Digium Iaxy to get customers to the AGI
program (whatever they press at dialtone jumps them to "enter your PIN
number").  This is working fine, but for a few issues with the sixteen of
them I currently have in service:

1) The Iaxy is prohibitively expensive per port
2) The Iaxy is difficult to provision in the field
3) It seems to overheat and lose its mind once in a while
4) poor network connectivity causes it to disconnect and STAY
disconnected, requiring a reboot

Its starting to drive me nuts, actually.  I went with the Iaxy in the
first place thinking it would be the best marriage to asterisk.  Then
someone handed me a Sipura SPA-2000 a few days ago.  It actually has a
built in IVR that you can use from either of the two FXS ports and an
analog telephone to read or SET network parameters.  The web interface is
excellent and has a wealth of options.  The Iaxy, by comparison, has a few
commands in a text file for options.  I had it connected to a local
asterisk in about thirty seconds, then in about an hour (much tweaking of
SIP NAT parameters on both ends) I got it working with our public asterisk
server and the prepaid phone card interface.

So now to the advice.  My eyes have been opened to the fact that the large
number of ATAs available are far from close in terms of quality, with the
Iaxy somewhere near the bottom.  What ATAs are people happy with connected
to asterisk?  Especially service providers that are provisioning them
remotely?

Thanks!

Jeff LaCoursiere
JB Telenet, LLC
St Thomas, VI 00802
jeff at jbtelenet.com