I first got my start in this business using POTS lines to a cheap ATA 4xFXO card. In fact, my story mirrors @Ducktour’s almost word for word, except I threw out my Cisco’s and replaced them with Aastra (Sangoma phones wouldn’t exist for another 8+ years).
After A LOT of tuning with the el cheapo ATA card, I got echo down to a nearly perfect and used it in production for years. Except once or twice a week there would be a complaint about talkoff, or missing caller ID, or mild echo, or something else, so the system was working well but not perfectly. Despite easily hundreds of hours of messing around with fax, I never did get fax to work reliably enough for production, maybe 90% success (good but not good enough).
At some point I popped a Sangoma TDM card w/EC in the PBX and ALL of my POTS complaints immediately went away. This was years before I would ever come to work for Sangoma. So if your time is worth nothing, and you are keen to learn the system, then I can’t imagine there is a more thorough way of learning the internals then trying to make a poorly performing ATA card work to production standards. It is also the most frustrating, and not something I would ever recommend someone go through when there are so many other things to learn that are more satisfying.
Making progress — I’ve purchased the Grandstream GXP 2140 handsets, and signed up with voip.ms for service. I’ve got a test phone set up and kinda working. For the time being, I think I’m going to get it set up without FreePBX (long term definitely want to investigate, but voip.ms seems to offer the functionality I need for a good price).
So far
– I can accept incoming calls on my ‘testing’ number.
– I can make outgoing calls on my home network.
– I can’t make outgoing calls on my work network when I’m plugged in my ‘normal’ way (for historical reasons, the ISP modem/router feeds my private router, which feeds my network. My private router has a private IP).
– If I head back to my communications center and plug the phone in directly to the ISP router, everything works as it should.
I plan on getting a separate PoE switch for the phones and running dedicated CAT5 to each extension, so I’m not too worried about this, but I’m going to invest some time trying to get it running as is regardless.