HN Explorer

Testing a e1/t1 card before shipping to haiti

3 points by aaronzinman ↗ HN
Hi friendly HN peoples,

We're shipping a server to Haiti, ideally Friday for an MIT project (konbit.media.mit.edu). It is a voice-based service that interfaces with the public via ordinary telephones. The goal is to make it easier to employ Haitian nationals rather than bringing in foreign contractors (the norm). It is 100% free & open source.

It will be hosed by Digicel, the main telcom down there. We have a Digium telephony card that connects to them via E1 channels. The card can do T1 and J1.

Does anyone have any equipment/T1 lines we can use to test the actual card before shipping it? Once we ship it is will be very difficult and expensive to try to deal with any broken cards.

<obvious>We're in Boston/Cambridge, so you should be too.</obvious>

We're reachable at konbit at-sign media.mit.edu

Thanks, Aaron & Greg

3 comments

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noonespecial
We use sangoma here. (Far more reliable than digium in our experience). We just set up a test bench with extra cards (a cisco 1720 with t1 wic for data and an asterisk box with another sangoma in master mode for simulating a telco). This allows us to test with any of the bazillion different line protocols you're likely to face on site (especially in a 3rd world setting).

Also when we face the inevitable problems on site, we can simulate Apollo 13 style at home base to work out solutions.

aaronzinman
That's a good idea. What were your problems with Digium cards?

Problem is we are on a very tight budget. Any money spent on testing is not on phone calls, which means less jobs for the population.

noonespecial
We had problems with Digiums vanishing from lspci and never working again (mid operation). Tech support vanished as well.

Sangoma was a completely different animal. Techsupport wrote patches just for us to help us get going on our wacky custom kernel for embedded devices. I think if you called sangoma and told them what you're up to, you are quite likely to get a steep discount or even free gear.