Seeking Advice About ISDN BRI Cards

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Hi, please whoever has some expertise in choice of BRI ISDN cards, please restore my faith in community support 🙂

(on private email I can probably explain more than fits for a public forum)

Most I’d like to ask is about what to choose, out of what is available…

My locality is United Kingdom, lines from British Telecom (BT), but any advice / pointers (I googled around already) are welcome…

My system to fit this card into, is FreePBX Distro with Asterisk 11, already running with incoming SIP trunk(s);
I wish to extend it to accept incoming ‘landline’ ISDN BRI (6 channels / 3 ports).

So far the interesting option(s) were Sangoma A500 and Digium B410P…
(the appliance is adopted from an old desktop that still only ever has PCI2.0 slots, no PCIE)
(there are also OpenVOX’s cards, although their installation guide is somewhat, well… in the old kernel era…)

Anyone who use(d) any of the above, not necessarily on a FreePBX – you’re welcome… 🙂

Kind Regards, Lukasz

10 thoughts on - Seeking Advice About ISDN BRI Cards

  • Checkout Beronet ISDN cards and Berofix Gateway (appliance or pci card)

    Personally for my last installation I chose Berofix card which is rock solid and reliable, yet easily configurable.

    With berofix you don’t need telephony drivers on the host system, the isdn card is detected as a NIC and all configuration is done using a web interface.

    Then you configure FreePBX a new trunk to use the berofix IP and that’s it!

    This way the mISDN and other channel drivers’ burden is skipped and works very well for me so far!

  • Beronet Gateway BFSB2HY , it works well for me two.

    From: asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com [mailto:asterisk-users-bounces@lists.digium.com]

    2015-05-26 12:17 GMT+02:00 Lukasz Sokol >:

    Hi, please whoever has some expertise in choice of BRI ISDN cards, please restore my faith in community support 🙂

    (on private email I can probably explain more than fits for a public forum)

    Most I’d like to ask is about what to choose, out of what is available…

    My locality is United Kingdom, lines from British Telecom (BT), but any advice / pointers (I googled around already) are welcome…

    My system to fit this card into, is FreePBX Distro with Asterisk 11, already running with incoming SIP trunk(s);
    I wish to extend it to accept incoming ‘landline’ ISDN BRI (6 channels / 3 ports).

    So far the interesting option(s) were Sangoma A500 and Digium B410P…
    (the appliance is adopted from an old desktop that still only ever has PCI2.0 slots, no PCIE)

    I would suggest to also consider Digium Hx8 boards which exist in PCI format.

    [1] http://www.digium.com/en/products/telephony-cards/hybrid/h8

    (there are also OpenVOX’s cards, although their installation guide is somewhat, well… in the old kernel era…)

    Anyone who use(d) any of the above, not necessarily on a FreePBX – you’re welcome… 🙂

    Kind Regards, Lukasz

  • Replying to myself 🙂 thanks for all the suggestions, they are helpful. but if someone, somewhere, whatever time zone you’re in, can bear to answer a few n00b questions, regarding any of the mentioned cards, please email me 🙂
    (in case gmane hid my email : el (dot) es (dot) cr (at) (the google mail service)…)

    Thanks in advance, Lukasz

  • Thank you all for valuable input,

    another question: when do I actually need the echo cancellation
    (hardware / on board /on module ) ?

    Lukasz

  • It depends on your environment. If there are still analog devices in addition to VoIP, I’d say always, but Asterisk has a rudimentary echo canceller already on board. The Telcos use echo cancellers themselves, but it cannot hurt to have a hardware canceller on your BRI card.

    Nowadays I see more problems with reverberation in connection with cheap speakerphones or simple mics and speakers on PCs, but that’s a different story.

    jh

  • I am going to have to be more specific, I see…

    We have the ISDN lines incoming into little boxes on the wall (BT ISDN 2e)
    from where they are plugged into existing ISDN PBX. The ISDN2e boxes have 2 ports, but 1 of each are connected to the ISDN PBX.

    There is nothing else connected to the ISDN2e boxes, no phones connect to these lines ‘directly’.

    Lukasz