>Hi,
>A friend of mine would like to provide PPP Internet to analog modem-based
>customers in Europe. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>On the customer side, he is planning to have an ISDN PRI and thus 30(?)
>lines for customers.
Fine in theory, practice may be difficult.
Quote:>We are wondering what is the best solution to connect the PRI line to his
>local ethernet network and thus his Internet router.
>- A PRI adapter in a Linux Pentium-based Box ? Does it exist with built-in
> modems ?
>- A dedicated box as an Ascend MAX 4000 ? What are other brands ?
I do not know of any brands, perhaps local telephone operators
can give pointers, however in my opinion as long as the customers
use analog modems, it is not worth to try to use ISDN technology
to receive them. (Provision of pure 64kbps digital service is
another thing, though.)
Easiest is to have 30 incoming lines and small PBX on which
incoming 2Mbps trunk-line is converted to 30 analog interfaces.
Then use 30 ordinary modems, and a few multi-port async line
adapters to attach them to the network.
With all-digital setup, those 30 lines needs 30 digital-input
modems which are hooked on TDM timeslots (ok, perhaps via a
timeslot multiplexer, such makes things easier), however at
least now such modems are rare, and a lot more expensive than
analog V.34 modems. ... and in every case they need 30 async
terminal adapter ports, even if virtual ones ...
My university has a modem pool with 58 modems on 6 terminal
servers (each server has 10 ports), they make a "permanent
virtual circuit" to certain port on a Pentium/66 machine
running special software (a glorified edition of "dip") on
a rather standard-issue Linux-1.2.8. (Well, with dynamic
slip-port device creation.)
That server has never had any CPU-performance problems -- it
acts as a router -- as most of the IRQ-intensive parts are
offloaded to the terminal adapters.
>I would appreciate to have recommendations on the above solutions and
>if it is foolish to have other suggestions.
>Thanks in advance.
>Francois Normant
>--
>Ecole Polytechnique - Mathematiques | Compu$erve: 75210,525
>Montreal - Quebec - Canada - H3C 3A7 | Fax. (514) 340-4463
University of Turku, Turku, Finland
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