Hi! I’m a newbie in asterisk but am planning to buy an X100P FXO card in a devian linux system. I’ve been doing some reading and I’m not quite sure if I understood things clearly.
An FXO card can only receive calls? Or could it make outgoing call using SIP?
Does a single FXO interface means that it could only answer one call at a time? Or could it answer multiple calls using asterisk and place them on hold?
What are the advantage of having multiple X100P cards?
Hope you guys could clarify these things for me. Thanks!
An FXO card is an interface card that allows asterisk to use regular POTS “copper” lines from your phone company. You can do both outgoing and incoming calls with it. SIP is a protocol for carrying voice packets over a network (internet) and is different from FXO lines. Of course, asterisk treats them both pretty much the same from what I understand. FXO = Phone Company Lines. SIP = VOIP/Internet phone line
I’m pretty sure not. Of course, I don’t know much about T1 voice lines, etc. Someone more knowledgeable than me should answer that.
The X100P’s have only one line, while the TDM cards have 4 ports that can be configured as FXO (phone company lines) or FXS (where you can plug a reglular phone into your asterisk system).
From what I understand, most of what pass as “X100P” cards are little more than modified modem cards since Digium discontinued them. I bought one off of ebay for like $20.00 U.S. and while it did work, the echo and especially the static were very bad regardless of any tweaking that I tried.
I’m just starting out with asterisk myself, so take my replies with a grain of salt. If I’m off-base on anything, I’m sure someone more knowledgeable that me will chime in.
If you haven’t been there, take a jaunt over to the wiki at voip-info.org
Also, I purchased “Asterisk: The future of telephony” and It’s a very good book and a valuable reference to have on my desk. You can download the pdf version from here:
[quote=“lee_is_me”][quote=“jkenneth420”]
2. Does a single FXO interface means that it could only answer one call at a time? Or could it answer multiple calls using asterisk and place them on hold?[/quote]
I’m pretty sure not. Of course, I don’t know much about T1 voice lines, etc. [/quote]
No. An analog line can only carry one communication at a time. When the FXO card is busy, either dialing out or answering an incoming call, it’s not available.
I experience the same thing with an X101P clone (different chipset from the X100P). Someone told that modifying usr/src/zaptel/zconf.h and /usr/src/asterisk/Makefile solved the static noise, but I haven’t tried yet.
I got rid the the clone 101xp card and replaced it with a real digium card with only one FXO. No echo issues, static, and kewlstart works just fine.
I wouldn’t suggest multiple 100XP cards unless your mother board supports dedicated interrupts per PCI slots. Shared interrupts wll prevent the configuration from being loaded and other random issues.
I found this out the hard way, my mother board has 4 PCI slots and only the first slot had a dedicated interrupt. Took 4 tries to find the right slot.