Google, Wikipedia directly on ASCII terminal?

[Peter Corlett]

On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 02:07:59PM -0700, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
[...]
> I doubt that will work quite like you are thinking. There is more to an
> analog phone line than the audio that comes over it. Namely the loop current
> and voltage are also additional bits of signaling.

The tightwad fix is to bodge a PP3 battery onto a line splitter, which is often
enough to convince modems that there is a phone line. There is no dial tone nor
ring signal, so you need to turn off dial tone detection on the calling modem
("ATX1", IIRC) and somehow tell the answering computer to send "ATA" to answer
at the right time.

> I don't think there is such a thing as a cross over phone line.

It's just a bit of test gear, which you should be able to find on eBay. I
suspect it will be priced like obscure test gear as well.

With the kit I have available, I'd just spin up Asterisk or FreeSWITCH on a
handy Linux box, set up a minimal local-only PBX, and plug the modem into a
VoIP ATA. This eliminates four hops worth of latency and jitter via an external
VoIP provider and thus should reduce or eliminate retrains and disconnects.

I could try and order an analogue phone line, but I suspect that KPN doesn't
have a script for that and would get very confused. (I also don't care to pay
their extortionate tariff of 11 cents per minute for local calls.)