Ring Voltage, REN, VoIP and a Bolt of Blue
In 1999, I wrote a humorous article for CTI Magazine, the precursor to Internet Telephony Magazine, about my adventures with a power outage at TMC that took out our Dialogic MSI analog cards in our PC-PBX. The MSI cards are responsible for providing ring voltage to the phones, but the quick power outage blew the ring voltage generators on the cards resulting in phones that wouldn’t ring on an incoming call.
OUT OF THE BLUE — A BOLT OF BLUE
Rather than working on the Dialogic boards during work hours, I decided to come in on a Sunday, when incoming phone traffic would be minimal. Then, I would be free to pull out both Dialogic boards and replace them with the new boards Artisoft had sent me.
While pulling out one of the faulty boards, I saw a blue arc of electric current, half an inch long, pass between the two boards! Since the boards were so close together, a soldering pin on one of the boards must have touched the other board. “Well,” I thought to myself, “if it wasn’t broken before, it’s definitely broken now!” I had that odd, giddy sensation you sometimes get when you think you may have destroyed something expensive.
Dialogic explained they had some issues with the BlackBox ring voltage generators and that they solved the issue, but not before I nearly fried myself. 
Well, I bring this all up because I just came across a great article from the Michigan Telephone, VoIP, and Broadband Blog…
Continue reading Ring Voltage, REN, VoIP and a Bolt of Blue…
Tags: analog, ATA, Cisco, REN, REN 3, REN 5, ringer equivalence number, ringing, ring voltage, VoIP, Vonage
- Related Entries
- VoIP Patents run amok -
Apr 02, 2007 - New VoIP Call Recording Software for Mac OS X -
Feb 12, 2007 - Court declares VoIP is exempt from service fees -
Mar 27, 2008 - VoIP Pioneer Slams Sprint -
Jan 25, 2008 - Hosted VoIP Packet Sniffing -
Jan 22, 2008 - Number Portability Redux -
Jan 21, 2008 - University of Cambridge claims largest IP telephony system -
Jan 14, 2008 - Vonage Blocking Ex-customer’s Phone Number -
Jan 14, 2008 - Cool Phones for FiOS, Uverse and other VoIP providers -
Jan 09, 2008 - Vonage Outage -
Dec 15, 2007
Original post by VoIP & Gadgets Blog
