Hello everyone,
I want to be able to use my old fax/phone Panasonic KX-F2610 with VoIP. My dad used this phone for well over a decade and a half, so I am sure it works. I don’t exactly want to buy a gateway, because they aren’t cheap. I have at home a few old pcs (Like 1995 - 2000) which have dial-up modems in them. I want to use them with Asterisk as a PBX between the VoIP and POTS phone. My questions are: Can I even do this? If I can, do I need some special drivers (Thinking not, windows dial can use all modems without special drivers)? Can I connect the phone and the modem just together with an RJ11?
Thank you for all responses,
Sincerely,
Adam Azzaro
Why not? Is there any reason why not? I know it would be easier to buy a VoIP phone, but I do not give up easily when I start on something.
Probably because modems make terrible devices for voice traffic, and
that is 99.999% of Asterisk’s purpose.
I did consider doing exactly this years ago to implement a poor man’s
FXO port to link to the PSTN.
It could be an interesting project to see if a softmodem can be
reverse-engineered into being a poor man’s FXO/FXS card (they’re quickly
becoming useless for anything else).
A proper FXS device isn’t an expensive piece of equipment, and I note
ISPs these days seem to be providing combined ADSL modem + 1/2 port FXS
router + WiFi AP devices for customer Internet connections so they can
plug their existing analogue phones into their Internet router for
forward compatibility with a purely “digital” public network.
Such devices provide good audio clarity, full duplex, low latency and
are quite reliable with support for many CODECs and handling of fax
signals. A dial-up modem with voice capability might have support for
G.711[au] at best, is likely going to be a half-duplex device with
limited audio bandwidth.
At some point, you have to consider how much your own time “costs” to
implement such a project and what your end goal is.
Yeah, your’e right. It is much smarter to do it a different way. At this point, I was just wondering about if it is possible or why not, and I really didn’t thik it would work.