[Asterisk-Users] A bit of a survey: What do do if you need morethan 4 C.O. lines

[Paul Dugas]

On Mon, February 21, 2005 8:47 am, David Cook said:
> There are two things that they don't do that the Zap cards do:

I've received nothing but positive and rapid support to any issues I've
had with my Voicetronix card.  We should make the distinction between the
low-level VPB device driver (analgous to the Zaptel drivers) and the VPB
channel in asterisk.  The former seems to be  100% Voicetronix's
responsibility while the later seems to be somehow shared between them and
Digium/Asterisk.  That said...

I bought one of the Voicetronix cards to see if their FXO interface could
do a better job handling echo that the TDM400 which I was having trouble
with at one site.  The Voicetronix FXO interface didn't have any problem
with echo.  No tweaking was required either; it just worked out of the
box.  Yay!

I have/had a couple issues:

  - I had to patch their VPB driver to get it to work with udev on
    my Fedora Core3 machine and get the /dev devices to appear.  I've
    sent the patch to Voicetronix.  Ben indicated he'd look at it when
    he got to the next rewrite of the driver.

  - I had to adjust the hard-coded timer for the CallerID so it would
    catch it here on my US phone service.

  - I'm having no CallerID detected on one line but I've not tracked
    that down yet.

The FXO interface works as far as I can tell.

I also wanted to see about their FXS implementation and was surpried to
find it very lacking compared to the Zaptel feature set.  I found the VPB
channel in Asterisk didn't support CallerID delivery to stations, *XX
service codes, and ambiguous dial plans with timeouts (this had been
fixed).   I've also had problems with the ringback not being sent to
calling stations (this too appears to be fixed) and crosstalk between
interfaces on the card (still looking into this one).  As a station
interface, I don't see much reason to use Voicetronix.

I'd like to reiterate that these guys have been absolutely nothing but
helpful, responsive, curteous, etc.  Ben has handled (or is handling) all
my issues and he's been great.  He's taught me much along the way.  These
guys deserve kudos for their effort to support *.  Attenention needs to be
given, however, to the VPB station channel in * if this card is to be a
viable alternative to the feature-rich Zaptel station channels.

Paul

-- 
Paul A. Dugas                    Dugas Enterprises, LLC
paul at dugasenterprises.com        1711 Indian Ridge Drive
p:404-932-1355  f:770-516-4841   Woodstock, GA 30189-6856 USA