"multiplicate" pstn line

Hi all,

I have no experience on Asterisk technology and in general PBX.

I try to explain the scenario:
I have a PSTN line associated to a phone number, and I want to “multiplicate” this line using a PBX, sending the “virtual lines” to fax lines.

PSTN Line ----> Asterisk server
---------> |(PSTN) Fax line modem
---------> |(PSTN) Fax line modem

---------> |(PSTN) Fax line modem

In other words, i need to use a single line to dispatch faxes to more than one fax line of a fax server.

Asterisk can be helpful for this chain?

Thank you very much!

Claudio

A PSTN line can support only one call at a time.

If you wish to send a call to many destinations using PSTN lines, you require many PSTN lines.

Thank you for your reply!

I don’t want to forward the call to many PSTN lines, i want to redirect the call to a specific line. My goal is to have, for example, one PSTN line, as input line, the asterisk server, and 10 telephones (or faxes) connected to asterisk server. I don’t speak so good english and I hope that my request can be clear.
Thank you.

Claudio

If I understand your request, you want to use a single PSTN line but send the calls as they come in to various extensions. Since you don’t say how you will determine where to send the call we can only assume that you will do it based on the Caller’s ID information.

If you wish to do this that is possible but you will have to setup your incoming context to take the callerID information and send it to another extension. This is also known as the ex-Girlfriend extension and it works pretty good, except that what I’ve found is that you don’t always have reliable information in the callerID variable. So it will only work as good as the callerID works. Here’s an example:

[incoming]
exten => s,1,Wait(2)
exten => s,n,Answer()
exten => s/7135551212,1,Goto(fax-ext,s,1)
exten => s/7135552121,1,Goto(my-other-ext01,s,1)
exten => s/7135551212,1,Goto(my-other-ext02,s,1)
exten => s/7135551212,1,Goto(some-other-phone,s,1)

How many of these you have would depend on how many other phones and faxes you have and of course the criteria you’re using to decide which other extension to send the calls to. You could also use wildcards so that the callerID field would not be so distinct, say you wanted to send all calls from a certain area code to a particular phone or fax machine. The answer is yes you can do this but how complex it gets depends on what you’re trying to do with it.

I guess you could also write some kind of script which picks an extension at random if your desire is to sprinkle the calls around your system.

Good luck.