[VoiceOps] Request for Opinions: High density ATA's

[Nathan Anderson]

Yeah, I've had my eye on the 1- and 2-port versions, though I've never played with them.  It's good to hear that they appear to be roughly the same architecture.  For low-port-count ATAs, we have stuck to using old Motorola models (mostly because they've been solid as a rock and have a fantastic T.38 implementation), but if our supply of those finally ends up running dry, we may end up switching to these rather than to something like a SPA or (heaven forbid) Grandstream.

It cheesed me off to get the response from Yeastar that I did back then...I mean, if your product is largely built on the back of someone else's work, and you didn't bother to pay them to directly license that work from them, then the least you can do in exchange for getting to use their code *for free* to build your own business is honor their copyleft requirement, and not pretend like it's your IP.  Also, I'd argue that having a product on the market that end-users or VARs can roll their own value-added firmware for using their own development staff would *increase* the value of your product, and make it wholly unique.  But I'm just a network admin, so what do I know...

-- Nathan

-----Original Message-----
From: VoiceOps [mailto:voiceops-bounces at voiceops.org] On Behalf Of Pete Mundy
Sent: Sunday, March 24, 2019 1:05 AM
To: voiceops at voiceops.org
Subject: Re: [VoiceOps] Request for Opinions: High density ATA's


Good on ya for doing the right thing in calling them out on it anyway Nathan! Great story :)

I've only used the single and dual port versions of these Yeastar boxes but I also discovered they were linux & Asterisk and I've found them to be quite reliable in the small numbers I've used.

Pete


> On 24/03/2019, at 3:09 PM, Nathan Anderson <nathana at fsr.com> wrote:
> 
> This is a little "outside the box" maybe, but you can get 32 ports of FXS from the Yeastar TA3200 (https://www.yeastar.com/fxs-voip-gateways/).  I've only ever used the 4- and 8-port versions which aren't rackmount and only have single-pair RJ11s, but supposedly the 1U 16-, 24-, and 32-port ones have both RJ11s on the front *and* Amphenols/RJ21s on the back.  And the 3200 can be had brand-new for about ~USD$550/ea shipped all day every day, if you know where to look...so the only way I know how to beat these $-wise would be some refurbished Adtran TA924e (which are arguably a more solid unit anyway, both on hardware and software side).
> 
> Though the price is right, these units definitely have their quirks.  I'm not 100% sure they can do single registration per-unit instead of per-port...I'll pull one of my small-port-count ones out to test.  They actually run Linux + Asterisk (ancient and very hacked-up/custom 1.6.2.x build as I recall) and for a while I contemplated building a custom ROM of my own for it from source in order to work around my own irritations, but last time I'd looked they hadn't released their internally-developed patches for either the kernel, Asterisk, or their build environment and I couldn't get them to budge on this, so I sicced the FSF and Digium legal teams on them...I think their attitude may have changed after that but I haven't had time to pursue further.  Also, even if I get the patches, it appears that their analog interfaces are not based on Digium DAHDI reference designs like so many others, but is custom hardware (+ software drivers which they may not have any obligation to release sou
> rces for, depending on how their drivers actually link up to DAHDI itself), so it may be a fool's errand regardless.
> 
> -- Nathan