atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums Wiring - Telecom Carriers - Trunks & Services T1's, CSU's and DSU's Channel bank as FXS ports for Asterisk?

There's a lot of old T1 channel banks floating around. I was wondering if there's a way to rig one up to give FXS ports for creating extensions on Asterisk instead of using multiple ata adapters like Sipuras. Most likely the hardware to interface with the Asterisk PC is overpriced like all T1 stuff, but has anyone actually tried this?

most channel banks will allow you to change cards out so ports can be used as FXO or FXS, the programming will need to be changed as well.

How do you reprogram the channel bank, through serial port or ethernet port or??? I have a couple Newbridges and a carrieraccess adit 600 to play with. I found manuals for the Newbridge but the carrier access site has something to hide unlesss you have a login. Anyone have documentation on the adit 600?

they do not have something to hide,they just do not want their products being serviced by unqualifed techs, or endusers for that matter. I have never used a NewBridge and really do not have much experince with Carrier access either, I am mainly an Adtran guy.

I've used to work quite a bit with the Newbridge 3624 and a tiny bit with the Carrier Access.

With the Newbridge, you can connect to the "Terminal" port located behind the locked access door.

We would use ProComm and configure it for 9600, N,8,1. The most common voice modules used with that channelbank supported loop start/ground start lines.

I will admit that channelbanks have pretty much disappeared from the scene since most PBX equipment today can connect directly to a T1 & CSU.

For you to interface anything with Asterisk wouldn't it have to be a SIP enabled device? How would you route calls to and from the analog ports through the SIP Server if they weren't?

There would also be the conversion from digital to analog. Where would that be done?

By the way, Adtran makes sip enabled routers that can do sip trunks to fxs ports. Check out the Adtran 900 series.

Well Asterisk can do SIP, IAX2 and Zaptel. Already it uses modems as FXO ports with the zaptel driver, and Digium makes T-1 cards, so I am sure it can be done. The bad thing is that a specialized interface for T-1 is rare and extremely overpriced. I always wondered why someone didn't make a T-1 to Ethernet converter. So the Adtran 900 can do SIP within the device? Sort of like a multi-port SIP ata box then? As for the CarrierAccess box, is there anyway I can get documantation for it?

There aren't many channel banks that are capable of FXS, and the ones that are, are very expensive. Don't know why....

We use channel banks mainly to connect analog stations to either an asterisk box digium T1 or a dialer's Dialogic T1. T1 cards plus a channel bank are cheaper than a 24-port station card.

re: "T1 to ethernet"....
Doesn't exist. But VegaStream makes a series of boxes that will gateway T1s, FXOs, FXSs or both to SIP. We have used one with 10 FXOs together with Asterisk.

The 900 series has the ability to take a T1 in and connect channels to a router card. Can be as many channels as needed but these are 64k data channels.

I guess it is like one big ata with varying fxs ports. You can also do FT1 passthrough if needed and I believe they also support v.35 passthrough.

Some models even have fxo/lifeline support if I recall correctly.

Hope this helps.