[asterisk-users] USA BRI -- any hope at all?

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 11:42:43AM -0700, Wilton Helm wrote:
> I discussed my installation more with Tzafrir last week.  He concluded 
> that he thinks I don't have an HFC card.  I think it is somewhat a 
> matter of semantics.  

It's not a matter of what I think. It's a matter of what you actually
have :-)


> As far as I have been able to determine, there are at least three 
> general types of HFC cards.  By far the most common are cards based 
> on the "Cologne" chip--which are well supported.  

You refer here to The Cologn HFC-S chip, I guess.

> The second group are based on a "multichannel" chip, which seems to 
> be fairly popular now, particularly for 2 and 4 port BRI cards where 
> a single IC can form the basis of the card.  

E.g. the Cologn HFC-4S (and similar). Not useful if you have a
single-port card (which are popular for the consumer market. Or at least
were). But handy if you want to create a device for a PBX , that has
more than one BRI port.

> The third group are based on the Winbond W6692 chip.  I think the 
> chip was released about 10 years ago.  

Which is what you have.

> It has not been well supported.  That is the chip my card has.  It 
> appears that no form of Zaptel or Dahdi, including publicly 
> available patches, supports it.

Right.

(Although if anybody wants to write a Zaptel/DAHDI driver for it, I'd
welcome it)

> 
> I'm not sure, but I think mISDN supports it, and I know my card is 
> CAPI compliant, but that may assume a driver that may not exist for 
> Linux.  Whether either of these supports US NT1 format remains a 
> question.  Also, there is the issue of physical level signaling, 
> which is different in the US than in Europe.  

IIRC (from personal correspondence with you) you have managed to get
layer 1 working with some ISDN driver (hisax = isdn4linux? mISDN?)

> I don't know if my NT1 U to S/T adapter takes care of that or not.  I 
> do know that there have been products out there that could be used in 
> either market with only a firmware change, so maybe this is a non-issue.
> 
> One of my TAs (I have several with differing feature sets and in 
> various states of repair and (non) support) will generate a D 
> channel transaction log, which would let me know what exchange is 
> required with the CO.  That might be compared to what the channel 
> software does.  I might be able to modify the source if necessary, 
> although there are two or three learning curves involved for me.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
icq#16849755              jabber:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
+972-50-7952406           mailto:tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com
http://www.xorcom.com  iax:guest at local.xorcom.com/tzafrir