ATA 186 & Fax/Modem/Skinny support

[letnet]

Anyone have any successful experience using an ATA186 for a fax machine or a user modem in a CallManager environment? Talking with our Acct. Mgr and and SE they indicated skinny support is upcoming for these - would that make it any more feasible?

We'd like to use the ATA186's as fax, modem, and cordless phone support in our new dorm (so people don't gripe about only having corded 79xx's :-) But were unsure of fax/modem support and scalability to 50-100 ATA's on a couple 7825's... (assuming skinny of course!)

- Ken

[vidirk]

I think that when using modem connected to ATA186 you get maximum 1200 baud.

[steve]

My experience has been that ATA's work reliably for faxes and OK for analogue phones. However we have only got a maximum of 9600bps modem connections. In our latest customer install, we have returned the ATA's for Cisco 827-4V's as these seem to get up to 28000 bps connections reliably and sometimes better.

If you are looking at scaling to 50-100 ATA's, you may want to consider investigating the VG248 product. As this product uses skinny, a cluster of 7825's will cope with these sorts of numbers while offering better feature integration.

My 2 cents worth anyway.

Steve

[letnet]

Yeah - I'd love to use the VG248 unfortunatley the whole point is the school wants to transfer incremental responisbiility for purchasing analog support ot the students and the VG248 would set us back 5-10K for a product we may only need 10 ports for (or could need 50).

The ATAs essentially auto-scale in a situation like that :-)

With our SE telling us skinny is coming on the ATAs would that make it oot or would 50 skinny ATAs hanging off be any worse than 50 7960s?

- Ken