Brian "Krow" Aker's Idle Thoughts - Sipura 3000

So in the latest adventures in home VOIP I had a little problem occur, my X100P card that I bought off Digium two years ago bit the bullet. The X100P card is what connects my Asterisk system to the outside world, aka the PSTN It will no longer work at all, you bring up the device via the Zapatel init.d script and it just kills the line. My other other Digium card that does phone lines in the house is working just fine but the X100P is just dead.

Before going off and buying another X100P, or another multi channel card, I decided to see if there was an alternative to doing this. I had purchased a Sipura 2000 a while ago and have been very happy with it. Combining it with the four port card I have in the computer, I now have six internal POTS lines in the house (plus the other phones that I configure via SIP... which brings up the point that the new Polycom 400 I have works incredibly well, better sound quality then my old Snom 190).

Enter the Sipura 3000, which has both an FXS and FXO port. Which translates into me being able to use it instead of jamming another card in the PC. Why do I care?

Cards in the PC only work so so for such a home setup (for a larger setup this is not the answer). If I upgrade the kernel I have to rebuild everything, which is something I really do not like doing. I am using Fedora for my VOIP server with Asterisk doing all of the heavy lifting. Fedora translates into me having receiving a new kernel with some frequency. Also, the cards only work on Linux and the best GUI I have seen so far runs on a Mac. I am still hand tuning everything on my asterisk server so I can't really use one since it could never parse the hacked up configuration I have got running.

I had the Sipura 3000 up and running in less then 30 minutes. I used the configurator at Voxilla to generate the configuration (BTW I purchased the device from them as well, good prices and they are doing good things for the community). Their configurator generated two configurations for me. One set to type into the Sipura and another set to add to Asterisk's configuration files. I had to hack the configuration for Asterisk a little, but that was just because my setup is so hacked in the first place. If I had had a vanilla setup I would not have had to have done that. The 3000 has the same Sipura interface as 2000, which means it is a bit sparse but very functional. You have limited ability to configure the device through a phone, and fully function interface via a built in webserver. One thing which is really missing is a reboot button on the built in webserver. I also can not find a way to dump the settings to a file so that I have a backup of the configuration.

If you are interested in doing VOIP and have zero interest in taking apart your computers (or are using OSX) this has to be the easiest way to get started. Since the Sipura 3000 is under $100 its also one of the cheapest ways of getting into the game. I am hoping that someone builds a Sipura like device that can be rackmounted which has multiple channels (want to bet someone does but I just haven't found out about them since they cost an arm and a leg?). I don't believe that cards in the computer are the way to really go for these setups and device that I could just plug a T-1 into would be quite nice.

Hacking the phone system is fun :)