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Comment by systems_glitch | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that Asterisk will run on very low-end hardware: for the last 7 or so years, I've been running a small Asterisk box on a VIA C3 Mini-ITX system. System idle power is around 10W. The only reason I chose the VIA C3 system over something newer was that a) I already had it and b) it had a PCI slot (specifically PCI, not PCIe).

The PCI slot let me plug in a Digium TDM800P and add eight POTS lines, either FSX or FXO, for pretty cheap.

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Today you could have the same average power consumption with an Odroid H3, and probably juggle more quality codecs too. (Well, sans the Digium card; but it’s just mindboggling how far we went with power consumption these days.)

I’m wondering how necessary POTS lines actually are these days (and how many connect to VoIP on the telco side). Should depend on the country.

The H3 has an M.2 slot and a separate emmc slot. So if you really wanted to use that card perhaps you could use an M.2 to PCIe connector and then connect that in turn to a PCIe to PCI adapter/riser. Power might be an issue though.

These days POTS lines are usually only used for last mile communications so the calls get converted to VoIP on the telco side. Basically it's for backwards compatibility — the phone lines are already there, a lot of people have phone wiring in their houses and no configuration is required on the consumer's end.

In general the days of having direct electrical connections between two distant telephones are long gone. The telco companies scrapped it when they realized that they could trunk the phone calls from a local branch to the central office using PCM streams over a single cable.

Metallic path between two stations that weren't terminated in the same CO has been dead for a long time! I suspect nowadays you're unlikely to have metallic path outside the frame you land on, if that, unless you're paying for dry pairs.

The POTS lines were largely for goofing around, though I did use a FXO port to bring in the local POTS line. Mostly I used the FXS ports to interface a 1A2 KSU to Asterisk to run my old WE 2500 series key station.

90% of the traffic was handled over SIP or IAX to desk sets or ATAs.

You will probably have a harder time finding hardware that won't run asterisk.

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