Hi,

I have a legacy Norstar system that I'm looking into integrating with my
Asterisk setup. 

My first attempts have worked, which involves a Wildcard X100P FXO card in
the * box connected to the Internal ATA (FXS port) on the Norstar system.

Calling from SIP -> Norstar works fine, since the SIP caller initiated the
call and generally will be sane enough to hangup the phone when complete,
making asterisk hangup the X100P.

However in the opposite direction, Norstar -> SIP, the problem begins,
thanks to no disconnect supervision/provision on the FXS port from the
Norstar, so the X100P doesn't know the Norstar caller has hangup.

A thought that occurred was perhaps Asterisk could do some sort of "soft"
disconnect supervision? So when the FXO card has seized the line, but there
is no transmit/receive audio (or no major variation from the standard
background radiation) then after a safe timeout of say a minute or two, it
could disconnect the line? I'd be interested to hear others views on this,
would it work (or does it already exist?).

Another thought is that the Norstar has both an 4-port FXO trunk card and a
4-port BRI-ISDN trunk card. The 4-port FXO card is completely free for use,
however it doesn't support disconnect supervision, so same problem there.

However, the BRI-ISDN card obviously does support disconnect supervision
_and_ Direct InDial, even better! Only two ports are in use, so I could
easily borrow one.

>From what I understand of BRI ISDN, it's not possible to just make a
crossover cable and connect this trunk card directly to an ISDN card in the
Asterisk box. 

Doing some searching, it appears there are quite a number of ISDN simulators
on the market people are using for Cisco exam preparations. I'm wondering if
anyone out there would have done, or know if what I'm thinking is possible?
-

[Asterisk Box ISDN Card] <---> [ISDN SIM] <---> [Norstar BRI Trunk]

Granted, there might be a need for NT-1's at each link for the ISDN
Simulator, but apart from that, would this work? 

The way I see it, so long as the ISDN sim gives asterisk a dialtone, accepts
a phone number, then passes that number (preferable a 3 digit number for
DID) to the Norstar, then one can dial direct from Asterisk to a Norstar
extension. Likewise, one can dial from the Norstar direct to the Asterisk
box, perhaps without the need for a auto-attendent menu to direct users if
Direct InDial numbering can be provided.

Anyway, just some food for thought at this stage on how to get around it,
the pricings for some of the simulators I've seen are prohibitively
expensive.

I think in my case it may be cheaper to replace the Norstar extensions with
brand new Cisco SIP phones and plug the ISDN trunks direct into Asterisk,
making the Norstar defunct and the whole system much more flexible... but
that's just a pipe dream at this stage :-)

Cheers,
Chris Lee 

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