There are no worldwide standard for telephone jacks. The North American RJ-11 pattern is used in over 100 countries through-out the world and if you are traveling to China, Greece or Vietnam, you will have no trouble plugging in your laptop modem, where-as, you will find that plugging-in is impossible without the proper telephone jack adapter, if you should be traveling to Sweden, Hungary and almost 40 other countries.
Complete selection of telephone jack adapters are now being offered by retailers, compatible to your laptop and modem, for your worldwide travel. There are duplex adapters, which will allow both the hotel's telephone and your modem to be plugged in simultaneously. This is quite an advantage, for it allows you to check the line quality and establish a connection without unplugging your modem.
In certain cases, you may find that the nationality of the hotel chain determines the type of telephone plugs used in that hotel rather than the country standard. This is a frequent occurrence with large US, British and German hotel chains. It is advisable that each time you plan to go abroad you should check this with your travel agent in order to make sure that you will be able to operate your computer system in the country that you are visiting or have the right telephone adapter with you. There are instances where the telephone in the hotel room is totally 'hardwired,' that is to say that the telephones installed in the rooms are without a jack. In this case there are three ways that you can solve your plugging in problem - first, you may use bare wire with alligator clips, wired to a RJ-11 line to create a connection, second, you can use a acoustic coupler that attaches the modem to the handset, or, if the telephone system in the room is digital, the handset should have a jack and, using a digital interface you can achieve the connectivity.
The other thing that you will need to check with your travel agent is whether the telephone system, in the hotel where you are booked in, is analog or digital. This is for the reason, that modems generally work with analog telephone systems, and for digital systems, you would need special adapters for your modem to work. The digital telephone system can be easily identified by the presence of a visual display, a data socket on the side, or additional buttons for such things as television channels and laundry and other services. Any attempt to plug in your modem with a digital phone may permanently damage the modem and render the digital phone in-operable. In order that you may operate your modem with the digital phone, you will need two things - one, an acoustic couplet that goes on to attach your modem to the telephone handset or a digital interface that connects your modem to the telephone handset jack. The equipment is driven by electrical power and hence you will need appropriate power supply along with, for these to operate.
The most common analog adapter has atleast one telephone jack (FXS port) for connecting a conventional telephone and an Ethernet jack, which you can use to connect to your LAN port in your laptop. Using an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA), you may very well connect a conventional telephone to a remote VoIP server. Using various VoIP protocols, you may have your ATA communicating with the remote server, encoding and decoding the voice signal by using a voice codec such as ulaw, alaw, gsm, ILBC and others.
What is VoIP? VoIP stands for Voice over Internet. You use your internet service for perhaps a monthly fee as a subscription to your internet service provider. You can send and receive as much data as you want on this service without paying any additional fee, especially when you have signed for a plan for unlimited use. This is not the case with your regular telephone, where you not only pay a monthly rental for each line that you have installed, you also pay for the calls that you make. Therefore, your telephone bill depends on your actual usage and your rental or rentals. With VoIP, you can send voice over the internet service that you are using. This voice is first converted into digital data and transmitted over the internet. By deploying suitable adapters, as discussed above, you can make calls over the internet which comes free to you.
ATA is a device that connects a standard telephone to a network or a computer system so that you can make telephone calls over the internet. Internet based calls, especially long distant calls are substantially cheaper than the regular calls. Further, ATA is much more cost effective than the specialised VoIP phones that connect directly to the Universal Serial Bus (USB) input of your laptop or computer system.
Most of the telephone jacks such as, RJ-11, usually comes with four conductors and may also be available with six. It is likely that this jack is used in your household or office phones. These phones are plugged into by ordinary wire which is not twisted, sometimes known as "gray satin" or "flat wire." The jack connects your telephone to the telephone company central office or to your private branch exchange (PBX) system by longer wires known as twisted pair.
There are several types of telephone adapters available for your required application. All of these ATAs provide you with connectivity between the telephone system and your computer or a network, with some of these performing analog to digital converstions and connects you to VoIP server, while others use software to do one or both of the tasks. The simplest one is RJ-11 type, which plugs a telephone and/or a fax machine into the USB connector in your computer, laptop or your handheld system. This type of ATA generally works in conjunction with software, typically a soft-phone program. The software acts like an interface between the telephone and the VoIP server, for digitizing the voice data so that it can be transmitted digitally over the internet.
In a large corporate setting, ATA has multiple telephone jacks, with an RJ-45 connection to the 10/100BaseT Ethernet hub or switch. This is used to connect to the Local area Network (LAN). Such an ATA, communicate directly with a VoIP server by digitizing voice data and using certain protocols like, H.323 or SIP. In this type of application, the software, as mentioned previously, is not required. Sometimes, the connection between a telephone and a LAN with ATA is referred to as VoIP Gateway.
A digital phone adapter simply lets you add the feature of VoIP capability to one or two of your phones. The adapter lets you attach your digital phone to an internet provider's (IP) network. This concept replaces IP phones, which lets you make calls without any adapters. The broadband phone system is the one where the internet service provider, provides you with the facility to make local and long distance calls for one low price. In such cases, the service provides you with secure online access to features such as phonebooks, call waiting, caller ID, voice mail, conferencing, call forwarding and more. In this case a telephone adapter is simply plugged into your high speed internet connection and the telephone is plugged into one of the two adapter ports, and you just need to dial from your telephone to initiate a call over the internet.
0 comments:
Post a Comment