I just said goodbye to ATT and ported my home number over to VoIP. What I want to do is keep everything sip in my basement and wire my existing punchdown block to my asterisk box and connect my existing analog phones in my house to asterisk. My question is this would 1 FXS port on a digium card be sufficient? or would i need a FXS port for each phone that I want to connect. Because I would like to keep everything as it was before. 1 call at a time on the analog phones would be fine.
You can do it either way… personally I’ve got a 4x handset Vtech cordless system on a single ATA. There is of course no extension to extension dialing, but that’s okay as it’s built into the vtech anyways.
Again, yes… just think of putting a DSL filter on a whole line going into a switch, you only need one. Similarly, I’ve got my parents’ old Samsung Prostar 816 with ‘line 3’ hooked into an ATA that goes out for really cheap VoIP.
Nothing magical about biscuits, modular outlets, or 66 blocks…
Unless you already have your FXS hardware, why even play with old analog phones? Unless running cat 5 cable it too much of a pain, you can get nice IP phones for under $50 a pop, and totaley avoid the need for any FXS hardware.
I have a mixture of IP phones and analog phones in my house, I DO note that even with a DSL filter running my POTS line which also has DSL on it into the tdm400 card seems to want to knock down the DSL when the POTS line is seized from either direction… but I think you mentioned that you are using VOIP as your main line… just be careful if you have a burlgar alarm or need 911 service… remember that in event of electrical system failure in your home you lose the ability to call 911. just because you have battery backup doesnt mean your ISP will remain up…
in my neighbrhood im on cable modem and not all the cable distribution points are self powered so in a storm if we take a good crack, ill lose internet connectivity even though the cable modem and asterisk server are on battery backup.
-Christopher