[asterisk-users] Advice on ISDN and Asterisk in the UK

[Gordon Henderson]

On Sat, 25 Oct 2008, Alan Lord wrote:

> Gordon Henderson wrote:
>> On Fri, 24 Oct 2008, Alan Lord wrote:
> <snip />
>>> I used to have an ISDN-2 line into my home office. BT wrote to me about
>>> 2 years ago and said they were discontinuing the service. They converted
>>> my dual channel BRI back into a single POTS.
>>
>> Sure it was ISDN2e and not Home or Business Highway? They killed off an
>> the HH and BG lines some time back and converted them back to POTS. I've
>> no idea why - I'd cancelled my HH line some time before the cut-off date.
>
> Yes, I think it was called Home Highway (but it *is* just a BRI at the
> end of the day). It had a USB port on the NTE which I never really
> grokked. Not being a Windows user and all.

Yup. Home Highway. It was good at the time - I had it, so I could have 
what was effectively a 64K leased line Internet connection and still make 
calls. ADSL Broadband more or less killed it.

You didn't quite get all the features of ISDN2e that I recall, however I 
don't ever recall ever wanting to use those features... And it was home 
powered rather than line powered, but that's progress for you...

>>> I built a little Asterisk server, stuck an X100p in it for backup calls
>>> should my broadband go down (on a separate POTS line) and got two
>>> non-geo 0844 IAX trunks for free instead.
>>>
>>> Who lost out there then?
>>
>> Well, quite. BT have their good points, but also their stupidly bad
>> points too.
>>
>> They phone me up once a month at present and ask me why I'm not placing
>> any outgoing calls with them. When I try to tell them why, (because I
>> run my own phone company!) because my reply is not in the script, they
>> just hang up on me.
>
> LOL - That's a good one.

I know - they always tell me that the call "may" be being recorded too. I 
put them out of their misery by teling the call definately is being 
recorded - by me :)

BT - Great bits of technology, forward thinking network features, etc. 
(Eg. TXT to speech as mentioned in another thread here), however they're 
driven by corp-rat decision makers being poked by greedy share-holders )-:

Gordon