[Discuss] couple of cheap (free?) Asterisk telephony cards

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

Bill Bogstad wrote: 
> So a local call center near me closed down and was giving away all of
> their office furniture for free.  By the time that I got there, they
> seemed to have gotten rid of any interesting tech.  There were a
> couple of add in cards lying around that they said that I could have.
>  I think they are some form of Quad-span T1 cards.  Marking are:
> 
> Front side of board:
> 
> Compuamt 2011/4/EC
> 
> Back side of board:
> Compuamt
> 2011/4/EC
> Asterisk 2-4 Port E1/T1/J1 PRI PCIE Card
> www.asterisk.com
> 
> The boards appear to be identical and unlike most of the boards that I
> can find online they have
> 4 dip switches labeled JPO on the front.
> 
> I know some people on this list work with Linux based PBX systems, so
> maybe someone familiar with the product line can clarify what they
> are.  I have no use for them and would be happy to pass them on to a
> good home.  I only picked them up because I thought that they might be
> useful and they were going to end up in the trash if I didn't take
> them.  I have no idea if they work so buyer/taker beware.

These are telco-PC interfaces, taking a full T1 (24 voice
circuits) or ISDN PRI (23B+D circuits) and converting that for
internal VOIP use. 

There was a time when these were very much in demand; telcos
didn't have VOIP available, so you would order a bunch of lines
and feed them into your Asterisk PC, turn them into VOIP, and
handle voice mail, phone menu trees, rerouting. 

Now a really good desk VOIP phone goes for under $100, there are
a thousand VOIP telcos that will offer you service, and if you
never have to convert from analog to digital, you can run your
server in a virtual machine or have someone else do it for you.

Which is all to say, ten years ago I would have found these very
useful, and now I don't want them at all...

-dsr-