…”anachronism”
Nul points to anyone who actually tries that one, I’m being figurative. Looks like this is the year for dusting off old technologies with a new lease of life, including:
- finding that Nokia 6310i with the busted keypad, because it plugs straight into the phone integration in my new-ish car (and finding it’s more responsive than my 2007 model Motorola phone)
- actually having to solder up a male/male 9-pin straight through serial cable (by destroying a couple of crossover leads) and then finding the only lappy which actually possesses a workable serial port is a Toshiba Tecra 8000, circa 1999. Naturally, despite being on a shelf at Schloss Cassidy for at least half a decade, it just starts up and whacks on into Hyperterminal (private edition of course, off a PC Pro cover CD…) without a murmur. The effort was worth it, to get into an HP 9308 enterprise backbone switch…
- snaffling a BT ISDN line that everyone forgot after they sent a DASS conversion letter. Once that is tested and working it will be fed into a small VOIP PBX system: I know of six ISDN lines, which BT were quite sure they could stop bothering with, which have been sharply re-commissioned for exactly this purpose for small biz VOIP. Watch out for Ebay prices on old EICON DIVA cards rising steeply…
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July 8th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
Why bother with an antique laptop? Just buy a USB to RS232 cable? They’re under a tenner online.
July 8th, 2008 at 7:48 pm
It’s a straight-through cable. USB RS32 is 99% of the time, crossover…
July 9th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
Yeah, fair enough i suppose. Then you’ve got to get a null modem adaptor too, to cross it back… I hate soldering those horrible little D9 connectors though - i’m so glad i never have to do that any more!
August 14th, 2008 at 9:24 am
I’m puzzled.
Surely a telephone exchange which plugs into an ISDN line is er a telephone exchange? Why bother with the VOIP bit and expensive IP phones?
August 14th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Fair point well made… in fact, it’s the other way up. A VOIP exchange may have 4 or 5 incoming streams of calls from internet gateways - aka “SIP Providers” - and only keep the ISDN line for those days when the Internet fails. One of my clients has just set up this way with their 0845 “switchboard” enquiries number delivered via their SDSL line from a SIP gateway, and their “Branch office” number delivered via the creaky old ISDN line. The software config of their VOIP box handles least-cost call routing to work out which type of link (ISDN, SIP or H323) best suits the call they are trying to make.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:59 am
(oh and you don’t need expensive IP phones. You can have bluetooth headsets and a PC soft-phone, or USB phones. I’ve been fiddling around with some crazy Freecom devices: a USB phone with a Skype button on it (which works well with VOIP soft-phone software) and a completely mad USB “speakerphone” unit - not even a keypad on it - that does a great job of being a loudspeaker phone system. At least, Tim claims it suits my style on the phone…!