My PBX planning has hit a snag. I cannot find a usb-fxs dongle anywhere.
Sangoma makes a usb-fxo, but no fxs. The ‘closest’ I have found is the Magicjack which is really a usb-ata.
There are of course PCI-FXS, I have one. I thought I found Ardunio FXS, but those are some sort of sensors.
Why not a standard ATA? Because fax is so bad from those I tested in the past; high failure rate. Plus I would want IPv6 on it. Fax SHOULD be better on direct polling of an fxs port. One less link in a T.38 connection.
So my choices are:
find a usb-fxs and get its drivers compiled on arm fedora.
get a Magicjack and use the Asterisk hack to connect it to Asterisk rather than their service (and how well does it support fax/t.38?).
Get a miniPCI slot on an arm board and use one of the miniPCI FXS cards and get drivers working on arm fedora.
does anyone have information on any usb-fxs dongles?
Thanks for the pointer. I see it is ‘upgradable’ to IPv6, rfc 1883. I will check with my Cisco IPv6 buddies about it being so behind on IPv6 specs.
And it is cheaper that the Planet VIP-157 that I found by widening my searching.
I would still like to find a usb-fxs solution. Seems everything out there in embedded cards land is for large setups (4 or more ports). No mini-pci solutions either. Going the mini-pci-to-pci connector route (that I have found some doing) is really a hack.
I will also may get a Magicjack and see how it works. But my searching on magicjack and faxing does not sound so promising. Perhaps faxing to the local asterisk is better, with asterisk doing the t.38 gateway function.
One answer and quite easy if you use a Debian based system as you do, is to install a t32modem or two along with spandsp and run it through asterisk/hylafax. No hardware/license needed, add Avantfax and you have a fully functional fax gateway with a GUI that can send and receive faxes complete with email forwarding. True you will have to get your hands dirty (and your brain) but it has worked very well for years now.
This is taking me back years, now from when I was starting out with asterisk, asterisk@home, trixbox, and freepbx. So bear with me.
FXO and FXS are different in behaviour. But if you take a ‘true’ t32modem along with spandsp, you can get it to provide fxs services, but your system has to handle all the i/o interrupt handling. Watch out for disk i/o design compromising modem interrupt handling.
Do I remember this right? You did jog a few brain cells there. And what about faster,‘newer’ modems? USB modems?
t38 is a protocol to hide the temporal aspects of T30 (analog faxes) over the newfangled interwebs, you can run it over any compatible fabric that is in that milieu, including Asterisk and the license-able Digium solution , or as I suggest t38modem, in my opinion hardware solutions are unnecessarily expensive and add a layer of possible incompatibility. Back in the day iaxmodem was the standard (still works well over a GOOD network), t38modem does much the same in virtualizing the faxness of faxes.
