Brooktrout 24v T1/E1 board

Hi,

I've just aquired a brroktrout T1/E1DSP voice telephony board - TR1000 P24VV T1

My understanding is that a T1/E1 connection is an ISDN line... but that's no good
for me.... ;-)

I want to connect it to a POTS line ( i.e. one plain old telephone system ) or to a VOIP PBX so i can dial it via VOIP

Now this is only a development box, so one line is enough... what's the cheapest way to enable this....?

Any help is appreciated....

Regards

Not sure what this has to do with ADSL but my first guess from Google is that you just have the wrong card for your proposed use.

It appears to be for US style ISDN (which I am not sure is compatible with the European setup) or a ?T1? link - which used to be a US leased line.

For POTS use you would probably need the analogue version instead of the T1 version.

Equally, to connect to a VOIP router you would presumably need an analogue interface.

Not a lot of help, really :-)

Hi,

The card does have an E1 ( european ISDN interface ) so i'm told....

A few posts rever to T1/E1 providing Fax over IP...

I'm sort of thinking their must be some way to connect this over VOIP!

Regards

A T1/E1 is a basically a whole bunch of 24 (or 30 for E1) ISDN bearer channels and a couple of D channels all provided through one cable. It's also known as an ISDN PRI (Primary Rate Interface), your usual ISDN2 (such as Home/Business Highway) is know as BRI (Basic Rate Interface) and only has 2 bearers and 1 data channel. It's generally used to either provide leased lines for data, 30 channels of voice/fax or a combination of the 2 (i.e you use half for data and half for voice). That's an over-simplified explanation, have a search on google if you want a more in-depth one.

It's not possible to connect it to a POTS line, you need a BT ISDN30 circuit which will cost you some ridiculous sum of money. For VOIP you'd need an FXS card to go in your PC, for POTS you'd need an FXO card. You can buy combination cards such as the Digium Wildcard (see here). Somewhere (I think it was voiptalk.org) sells a Wildcard TE400P development kit which has 1 FXS and FXO. These cards work with Asterisk, another option would be an Intel Dialogic D4-PCI but they're quite inflexible, I believe, only doing FXO. There are of course other options out there.

Hope that helps,

Paul

Hi Paul,

Thanks for getting back to me, i do appreciate it ;-)

T1/E1 Platform

As far as I remember Asterisk doesn't work with the Brooktrout cards (based on the Asterisk Wiki). But that doesn't mean you can't get another T1/E1 card that is compatible (such as the Digium TE110P) and use an E1 crossover cable to link the 2 cards. We currently have one here at the office linked to a legacy PBX for testing.

Basically, Asterisk will turn a linux box into an IP PBX, have a read up here and here for more info on Asterisk also have a read of the VoIP forum on ADSLGuide. You can run an IP phone on the system itself for development if you wanted (Something like SJPhone I think). To interface with a POTS line you would still need an FXO card (such as the Wildcard). Another option which just came to mind would be a channel bank, you interface to it with a PRI and it has FXS/FXO channels out of it, they're not cheap either though.

I'm not really sure what you're trying to achieve here, do you really need a T1/E1 board? As I understood it you just wanted 1 phone and 1 line for development so, to me, T1/E1 seems a little overkill just to interface to a POTS line and a phone.

Paul

Hi

Would an ethernet port help? why would their by one?

The TE110P card has a T1/E1 input... The brooktrout board would interface with
this card via a crossover cable... ( is the T100 the same, but an older model? )

This would turn my pc into a 24 voice IVR system....

Sounds like I'd need a basic linux server and some asteriks knowledge...

Do you know of any hardware VOIP PBX's that expose a T1/E1 port that i could use to connect to the brooktrout card...?

I need to keep the brooktrout board on a windows server as it would be running MS speech Server

Could i just but an old PBX..with an T1/E1 connection... what specifically would i need to look for?

Are their any other Windows PBX's that could get a T1/E1 line for...?

Regards

Edited by wrighty (Wed 14-Jun-06 21:46:11)

From reading through the threads, I'm not sure what exactly it is you are trying to achieve. In fact I'm not even sure that you know what you are trying to achieve.

The only thing that a T1/E1 card will be useful for is connecting to a T1 or E1 line - ie a trunk telephone circuit that would typically connect to/from a PABX to provide incoming/outgoing lines.

So, the only useful scenarios that I can currently see would be:

a) You have/want to build a PC-based PABX using VOIP on the inside/"private" side, but with a 24/30line incoming PRI bearer for PSTN calls.

b) You have an existing PABX to which you wish to add VOIP capabilities (either on the inside of the "outside") by gatewaying (via the T1/E1 card) to PC-based VOIP system such as Asterisk.

In either case you are talking about **serious** telephony development, costing serious money.

If neither of these scenarios fit your intended purpose then the card is of little to no value to you, so I hope it didn;t cost you too much!

Good luck whatever it is you are trying to do.

vyzar

Ah, I think I see what you're trying to do..

Ok.. So if I understand it correctly:

You want a 24/30 port IVR system (utilizing the Brooktrout card) which you want to connect it to a PBX.

Asterisk itself can be used as an IVR system and can be used purely for VoIP out of the box with no hardware (using a VoIP provider to provide the lines).

The configuration would look much like:

PSTN <-> VoIP Provider <-> Internet <-> Router <-> Asterisk PBX/IVR

Your configuration would look more like:

PSTN <-> PBX <-> IVR

Ethernet wouldn't come into it except for the VoIP side. The RJ48C connectors are probably both T1/E1.

You could just buy an old PBX, you would be looking at something like an Avaya IP Office, 3com NBX or Samsung DCS (I think it has a PRI). Of those 3 only the Avaya and 3com have IP connectivity but I don't think they use SIP. I'm not sure about Windows, there is a Win32 port of asterisk available but I'm not up to date with where it is with it's hardware support. A google search for Asterisk Win32 should help on that one.

Hope that helps,

Paul

Hi,

I'm after an internal 'private' PBX with a T1/E1 input so that i can plug in my brooktrout 24 Voice T1/E1TR1000

If the PBX has an FSO that lets me connect/receive an outside line than that's also better...

Unless I have some other way to use the brooktrout card via a software VOIP PBX without buying any extra hardware....

Regards