[Asterisk-Users] An anniversary and a lament for FXOs

[Wilson Pickett]

> This week marks one year since I first setup an Asterisk server in the
> hopes of transitioning my home office to a total VoIP system. 

I have only been doing it since May

> I've tried X100p cards but found them horribly unreliable. 

The reason I'm answering is to weigh in with the fact that I have a
SOHO system running with two POTS lines connected to two X100P cards,
three FXS through the TDM400P. The cards are sitting in a PIII-800
Asus mobo with 512MB RAM.

Everyone is talking about voIP, but within the office (FXO<-->FXS), we
have no echo, only if going out to SIP or IAX is there any and it
usually is only in the very first part of a call. The person who
mentioned rxgain and txgain  certainly has a good point, I think
that's very important to get right.

I suppose I should consider us lucky that things work well, but I also
know that the Slackware box I use has nothing unnecessary running and
no "extra" cards using any IRQ.

I used to do a lot of digital audio recording and in those days, a lot
of people on the forum discussed video adapters as the cause of a lot
of interference. Those of you who may read this and think "I wanna try
asterisk": if you plan to build a box from spare parts as I did, try a
few different cards. I don't even have X set up in the asterisk box,
just the basic OS, Apache and mysql (which I don't currently run  or
use, but it's there.) Even Apache isn't started on boot, only if I
want to use it for the manager.

My own observation of 6 months of this is that the hardware is
certainly NOT "plug and play", I'd say many, many people have had
problems with both the X100 and the TDM400 cards in the beginning. The
TDM did give me trouble at first, but it was apparently IRQ issues
that got solved with a little experimentation.