As businesses modernize their telecommunication operations to meet today’s growing demands for improved security, monitoring, emergency response and employee training, the level of sophistication required in infrastructure upgrades is forcing them to find solutions based on IP. This is no challenge for businesses which are already based on IP communication, but for those which run primarily on legacy PSTN equipment, they will need to find a solution that allows for PSTN to IP conversion, since the two protocols are not compatible.
A very typical mechanism to marry an IP-based solution with the PSTN is by using a VoIP gateway. These small appliances provide seamless communication across the dispersed technologies, such as analog and IP, and simply requires you to plug cables into an appliance. However, in environments which provide mission critical services, there are some challenges:
- Nearby equipment can cause noise disturbances which affect the performance of a VoIP gateway, causing degraded voice quality
- The endpoint devices which need to connect to the gateway may be quite some distance away and may run over poor lines
- A typical example are trackside analog phones at railway infrastructure, or emergency phones along side industrial sites
Finding a VoIP gateway vendor which can handle the above conditions can be quite difficult and careful considerations must be taken to verify the compliance for these and other environmental unknowns, which can affect the chosen communication solution.
There may be scenarios where the IP-based solution needs more than a VoIP gateway that just translates PSTN to standard IP for voice. The solution might need the PSTN calls in a specific non-standard form of IP to be compatible with the software, or might even need to translate an inbound PSTN call to a different form of data and send off to another legacy system.
In such cases, custom appliances can be created using telephony cards which are typically supported by most commercial grade server appliances. These telephony cards can come in many different PSTN port combinations, such as T1/E1 or analog and by installing software to talk to the telephony cards, solution providers can create their own gateways which fit their own needs. Time should be invested when selecting the telephony card vendor to verify that the card driver interfaces with the software and even if there is a simple API include to help achieve the desired results.
Fortunately, Sangoma provides solutions to all of the above mentioned scenarios. Sangoma Vega VoIP gateways, specifically the Vega 3000 series are designed to withstand noisy environments, including electromagnetic interference (EMI) as well as long line lengths of at least 12 kilometers in distance. For creating custom applications and gateways, Sangoma telephony cards are highly compatible within most commercial grade servers and come with a driver suite and powerful API to allow you to integration your software solution with the PSTN.
To read more about how Sangoma Vega VoIP Gateways and telephony cards can ensure legacy telecom for your operational environments visit staging.sangoma.com/data-wan/
