I apologize right off the start, I’m fairy new to FreePBX. We are currently planning a migration from a Mitel PBX with PRI over to FreePBX with SIP trunking.
On the Mitel, we have some extensions configured as inbound/outbound analog dialup lines through the PRI. From what i understand modems don’t work so great over SIP trunking so I need to figure out how to make those dialup lies work with FreePBX. I’m being told that i could probably use an FXS card to connect the dialup devices(ie. fire panel, energy meter etc.) to this card and if i added a PRI card on my FreePBX i could route the calls to and from those devices via the PRI.
You could do that but I would suggest that for mission critical things like Alarm Panels and elevators, just get a couple Measured service analog line (1MB in the US) they are a lot cheaper than a PRI, and are easier to get accepted by your insurance/alarm company. if the service is dial-out only, then you can “share” that line with multiple devices, good alarm panels have “line-grabbing” circuitry that will seize the line if it is already in use.
Given that if you have modem type hardware, then FXS to SIP connections will usually handle signaling up to 9600 baud without a problem, you can often set the baud rate lower on the device if necessary, be careful to always use g711 for such calls.
An idea that was suggested was to install an FXO and FXS analog cards in our FreePBX box to handle modem devices and as a backup to the SIP trunks. In the event that our internet connection would be unavailable, we could route all outgoing calls via the POTS line connected to the FXO card.
The modem devices (ie. Fire Control Panel, energy meter, etc…) could also share those analog lines so SIP for those would not be used. That seems like a pretty good setup but what do you do if your FreePBX in on virtual on VMware? Could you use an External FXO/FXS gateway to achieve the same? If so, which gateways are supported by FreePBX?