Making my own POTS lines

[essenz]

I rarely dable in the phone side of things, so I am not sure if what I
want to do is possible.

The datacenter I am in makes it very difficult to get individual POTS
lines, do to cross connect fees, conduit, etc.,. I need the lines for
analog faxing, dialup modems, and other types of remote management. I
need about 10 POTS lines.

Now, I can easily get a single Voice T1 PRI. With that, and the
appropriate equipment, can I utilize that PRI to sort of create my own
POTS lines that will be compatible with modems and faxing? Would a PBX
still be required, or could it all be done out of a single cisco or
adtran device?

Thanks
John

[GlowingBlueMist]

Post by essenz
I rarely dable in the phone side of things, so I am not sure if what I
want to do is possible.
The datacenter I am in makes it very difficult to get individual POTS
lines, do to cross connect fees, conduit, etc.,. I need the lines for
analog faxing, dialup modems, and other types of remote management. I
need about 10 POTS lines.
Now, I can easily get a single Voice T1 PRI. With that, and the
appropriate equipment, can I utilize that PRI to sort of create my own
POTS lines that will be compatible with modems and faxing? Would a PBX
still be required, or could it all be done out of a single cisco or
adtran device?
Thanks
John

Check out the Asterisk PBX system at www.asterisk.org

You take just about any old PC, add the free software, mix in a few hardware
boards to support the type of lines you need, and you are good to go.

[John L]

Post by essenz
Now, I can easily get a single Voice T1 PRI. With that, and the
appropriate equipment, can I utilize that PRI to sort of create my own
POTS lines that will be compatible with modems and faxing? Would a PBX
still be required, or could it all be done out of a single cisco or
adtran device?

A PRI needs to plug into a PBX or something like it in order to do the
call management. If you just want some POTS lines, see if you can
instead get a channelized T1, which is physically the same as a PRI
but without the ISDN smarts, just one logical phone line per channel.
Then all you need is a channel bank to break out those lines to analog
ports. Poking around on the net I see some great deals on T1 channel
banks, some under $200.

You can get PRI channel banks, but they're not cheap. The Adtran 550,
for example, with analog channel cards costs over $3000.

With respect to the other suggestion to run Asterisk on an old PC, you
could easily make that work but to get your analog ports you would
have to buy port cards that typically cost upwards of $100/port.

[James Cloos]

essenz> Now, I can easily get a single Voice T1 PRI. With that, and the
essenz> appropriate equipment, can I utilize that PRI to sort of create
essenz> my own POTS lines that will be compatible with modems and
essenz> faxing? Would a PBX still be required, or could it all be done
essenz> out of a single cisco or adtran device?

You can connect a channel bank to the PRI and have it route each
B-channel to a pots line. You shouldn't need a pbx.

That should be the most reliable option.

Some channel banks can pass part of the PRI on to a downstream T1, in
addition to driving the analog (pots) line cards, should you require
fewer than 23 pots lines and have any use for digital lines as well.

-JimC