Ata boxes with lots of ports

I have not tried the linksys but I have use the adtran 900 series and it works great. I'm not sure what the cost difference is but I can tell you that your customers will be very satisfied with the performance and Adtran's support will be a big help to you. We have over 100 of these deployed doing everything from converting SIP to PRI or our Hosted to multiple lines in Apartment complexes.

Adtran's 900 series will come out on a 25 pin amphenol connector that you will need to punch down on to a 66 or 110 block. If you want rj11's then you could try the SPA 800, looks like you can pick these up for around 250. Adtran 924 will run you around 1,500, mostly because there also a T1 router, can hand a PRI to a PBX, do SIP to SIP routing, etc.

Hope this helps.

Just in case your wondering, I looked up the pricing while writing and forgot to change the first part :)

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I would think one of the important considerations for a Hotel Motel type applications would be to make sure the MWI on the alalog phones work. I was able to get analog MWI to work using AudioCodes FXS gateways. Has anyone else had any experiance with FXS gateways that support this important feature for Analog Hotel type applicaions

is there a specific standard to do WMI fon those analog hotel phones? The rhino channel banks claim to support message lamps. A call to adtran would quickly tell you if they support it or not, I cant imagine them not supporting it since they do support the other message notification.

Unfortunitly, there are several standards to work with. Some analog phones use the second pair of wires, Yellow/Black, and others use fsk tones like caller ID.

I am no expert on this subject. What I do know is how much I don't know when the stupid light won't come on and I need to determin what is wrong.

This is one of thoes things you have to test before you assume just because analog phone has a message lamp, it will just light when you get a message.

I am sure adtran could tell you what they support.

Denis

Denis

well a 2nd pair of wires seems to be a complete disqualifier since those amphenol cables are 25 pin which is a single pair of copper per port. I know they do it the way the telco's do it to your house (stuttered dialtone plus some other signal) that makes those cordless house phones display the envelope icon on the handsets :-) , so taking the hotel out of the equation, those adtran's work fantastic for a similar environment (condo buildings).

MWI has never been very standard... they all generally varied by manufacturer because it wasn't a Telco supported feature till recently (like when major carriers started adding voicemail). There was no industry standard as the MWI signal couldn't reach beyond your own PBX in your office.

I believe the earliest versions either relied on a 2nd pair of wires to light the lamp (not unusual, look at 1A2 key equipment some time, took 3 pair to run each button). The other early version I've generally seen referred to as "90V Neon"... the PBX sends a 90V AC signal down the line, and while the signal is similar to ring generator it's 180 degrees (i think that's the right shift) out of phase... so instead of ringing the bell, the light blinks. This type of phone has 2 filters in it... one filter directs ring generator to the bell, the other filter directs the MWI signal to the light. I believe 90v MWI signalling is the most widely used.

Avaya (Lucent, AT&T, etc.) also has a 24V MWI standard. Most newer analog phones support both the 24V and 90V with the same light. I assume they just include some extra filters.

FSK signalling is out there, but I'm pretty sure that is the latest thing. It showed up around the same time as Caller ID, stutter dialtone, etc. (for home phones at least) I have a few late model cordless phones that light up when we have messages at the telco voicmail... I assume they get the FSK signal when we go off hook. I haven't seen this feature in too many hotel style telephones yet.

I suppose I didn't add too much here. Mostly just wanted to point out that WMI is one of those black magic telcom things... even if you think you know it and you've got it covered... you still might get stuck with mis-matched equipment. Best to test.

I know we've been burned on this in the past when we setup TDM off-pemise extensions using Adtran gear. They would have multiple FXO and FXS card options... some would support WMI, some would do Caller ID, some would do both.

Ryan:

You said you are using the Adtran 900 series to do PRI handoffs to legacy customer PBX equipment? And it works well?

Just wondering how you implement that? Do you create a tenant for the customer in MTE and then route the DID's to them?

Thanks for any info.

adtran works fine for PRI hand-off. We have a customer using call manager express on a cisco router and they get their dialtone via PRI from an adtran 908.