Digital Phone System ?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. At work, we have a phone system called Meridian Mail, that they tell me is digital, and they say regular modems won't work with it. I am dieing to get a modem in there so I can alleviate boredom by logging in. ;) Is it possible? Any help would be appreciated!

A. Meridian Mail is actually a voice mail system, not a PBX - but chances are pretty good it's hooked up to a Meridian PBX, which is digital. Your phone support folks are correct - you can't plug an analog telephony device such as a modem directly into a digital PBX. You can buy an adapter for a Meridian PBX which provides an analog line, but with degradation of signal quality (since you're going through one additional D-A converter and one additional A-D converter each way), and at least the one we have suggests that it shouldn't be expected to work well with modems beyond 9600 bps. For those who have needs for many analog modems sharing lines with their digital PBX, we found a weird way of doing it. We have an analog PBX placed between our digital PBX and the telco. For each inbound line, it's configured to route the call directly to a particular extension, many of which are connected directly to the digital PBX (but some are connected to modems which must take inbound calls). For outbound calls, it is programmed with a hunt sequence of lines it can steal, starting with the least important modem lines and working up through a few modems into the voice lines at the bottom of the hunt sequence from our telco. It can also be set up with a different inbound line mapping for night service, so that we can dedicate some of the lines which are normally hunt lines for inbound voice to specific modems at night. Since it's an analog PBX, there are no problems from repeated conversions between analog and digital, and there's actually very little signal degradation inside it (AFAIK, the actual connections are made with relays). There's a neat product available, whose name escapes me, which plugs in between the handset and the body of a digital phone set. The cable to the handset is analog, and so you can plug a modem almost directly into it. There is some kind of gain control in this box, and it's definitely necessary (it has a four-position switch, and I've found that often connection becomes impossible if you change the switch setting). It's not a fully automatic product; you have to lift the receiver to take the digital set off-hook before you can dial, and replace the receiver when you want to hang up, but for attended operation it's useful. I think it's from a company or product line named Konexx. It was mentioned in a PC Magazine story on tools for road warriors earlier this year. We've achieved mid-speed V.FC connections with it between a client site in NJ and here in Toronto, over phone lines with poor high-end response. I don't know how good a connection we'd have achieved with an analog line, but I doubt this gizmo cost us too much performance.

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