ATA and Payment Terminals

[jvolek]

Hello.

Have you anybody any officially information, that the ATA devices support also analog payment terminals?

Do you have any practically experience?

We are now testing one ATA in our customer and it works well. We're going to plan to use them in shopping centre with cca 150 shops. What's your idea about it?

Many thanks.

Jiri

[ebreniz]

The Cisco ATA 186 was originally designed as a low-cost voice platform, and manufacturing tolerances were chosen to support voice services only.

Cisco customers have experimented with fax transmission using the ATA 186 and many have been successful.

The Cisco ATA team verified customer testing in Cisco labs and agreed that fax passthrough is generally successful. Cisco announced software support for fax implementations in June 2001.

As more customers began to use the fax feature, field failures were reported. There are two causes for field failures. Some are due to software bugs, but others were found to be a design limitation of the platform.

Fax passthrough using ATA 186-L cannot be guaranteed above 9600bps. Even at 9600bps or below, some fax machines may be unsuccessful with longer documents.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/gatecont/ps514/products_field_notice09186a0080094af7.shtml

[MARTIN STREULE]

Hi Jiri,

Yes, we have successfully integrated payment terminals with ATA-186's.

Our payment terminals run with very low speed (1200)and we had no problems at all.

Anyway, before promising anything to your customer, run test's in different locations in a way that you cover your entire HW set (PSTN gateways, switching, ...) and get your own experience.

If you have a good "test coverage" it should acually work pretty well.

Be sure to have a "plan B" if some sites have problems (where you could use FXS ports in the gateways..).

/Martin

[jvolek]

Hello.

Thanks for the info. We've decided, to use IP payment terminals in our project. I 0think, that there wouldn't be any (or minimal :c)) problems.

Two months ago we also successfully tested ATA devices with payment terminal. Anyway thanks for another positive message.

Have a nice weekend.

Jiri