Project 365 #362: 281214 Trip Through Your Wires
Not a great photo, but a good illustration of the larger part of my day.
Having run some cables through from the cabin to the house, today I decided to have a go at cabling up the telephone line.
It look longer than it should as the wall plate I was using turned out to be the wrong type. Although they all use the same socket they come in different flavours to do with inline capacitors. This meant a degree of fault finding, but it's working now.
Equipment like this Panasonic 16 port analogue PBX will start becoming rarer and rarer as time goes on. I hesitate to call it obselete, as it does its job sublimely well, and more modern technology doesn't do it any better.
The reality however is that VOIP technology means that you can run a 16 port switchboard like this from a £25 Raspberry Pi the size of a box of matches. And people do.
So why haven't I? Well...a couple of reasons.
Firstly, this kit is working very well and I'm minded not to change it until it dies.
Secondly, handsets are getting a lot cheaper, but sixteen handsets is still a big investment.
Thirdly, there's a weak link in the VOIP chain, and that's interfacing to the PSTN - the good old phone line.
Arguably, you don't need to. You can sign up with a VOIP provider and route all your phone traffic through your internet connection, leaving the PSTN interfacing as their headache. That's not always a good choice though. At a corporate level it makes loads of sense, and it's what we do very successfully in work. At home though, we're mostly running through ADSL which requires a phone line. These can often come with some fantastic inclusive call packages. That, as well as the resiliency of the phone line, means that you often want your domestic traffic routing through your good old phone line.
Now in theory it should be a piece of cake to interface the computer running the switchboard to a phone line. In practice it's often a bloody nightmare. A thirty second internet search on "VOIP echo" will cast a dim light on the murky world of trying to get it all to work. Problems with low volume and unacceptable echo are frequent and often very, very difficult to resolve.
For now then, the Panasonic keeps on living. :) With the dodgy plate swapped out the wiring was a piece of cake thanks entirely to the very, very neat and ordered work that Dave did when he first installed it. Cheers bud!
Project 365 #362: 281214 Trip Through Your Wires
Not a great photo, but a good illustration of the larger part of my day.
Having run some cables through from the cabin to the house, today I decided to have a go at cabling up the telephone line.
It look longer than it should as the wall plate I was using turned out to be the wrong type. Although they all use the same socket they come in different flavours to do with inline capacitors. This meant a degree of fault finding, but it's working now.
Equipment like this Panasonic 16 port analogue PBX will start becoming rarer and rarer as time goes on. I hesitate to call it obselete, as it does its job sublimely well, and more modern technology doesn't do it any better.
The reality however is that VOIP technology means that you can run a 16 port switchboard like this from a £25 Raspberry Pi the size of a box of matches. And people do.
So why haven't I? Well...a couple of reasons.
Firstly, this kit is working very well and I'm minded not to change it until it dies.
Secondly, handsets are getting a lot cheaper, but sixteen handsets is still a big investment.
Thirdly, there's a weak link in the VOIP chain, and that's interfacing to the PSTN - the good old phone line.
Arguably, you don't need to. You can sign up with a VOIP provider and route all your phone traffic through your internet connection, leaving the PSTN interfacing as their headache. That's not always a good choice though. At a corporate level it makes loads of sense, and it's what we do very successfully in work. At home though, we're mostly running through ADSL which requires a phone line. These can often come with some fantastic inclusive call packages. That, as well as the resiliency of the phone line, means that you often want your domestic traffic routing through your good old phone line.
Now in theory it should be a piece of cake to interface the computer running the switchboard to a phone line. In practice it's often a bloody nightmare. A thirty second internet search on "VOIP echo" will cast a dim light on the murky world of trying to get it all to work. Problems with low volume and unacceptable echo are frequent and often very, very difficult to resolve.
For now then, the Panasonic keeps on living. :) With the dodgy plate swapped out the wiring was a piece of cake thanks entirely to the very, very neat and ordered work that Dave did when he first installed it. Cheers bud!