First time E1 connection using pfsense
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Hi All,
It's my first time to have an internet connection using E1 with pfSense, I have numerous pfSense boxes but all are just using ordinary DSL, my question is do I need a special piece of equipment aside from the modem supplied by the E1 provider and my pfSense box just to get started, the provider technician said that I need a Cisco router just for this, is this true? Will anyone kindly share his experiences with setting up an E1 connection, a good how to begin will be greatly appreciated.
TIA
Jan
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Isn't E1 the euro-spec version of the T1? If the provider does not supply a router, you will need to get a router to convert to the E1 to Ethernet. Like a Cisco with an E1 wic or similar.
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I don't know about the euro spec version thing, I'm in Asia, the Philippines to be exact, AFAIK E1 is a step higher than T1, i.e., as far as our country is concerned. The provider told me that the modem they will provide doesn't have a routing function and I'll need a Cisco or something similar router that will route the WAN IP to LAN IP which are all public IP.
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Wiki has a list ow what E and T's are:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-carrier#Notes
A T1 is basically a carrier with 24 time-slots with each 64kbit/s (1.5Mbit).
The E1 is the european counterpart but it has 32 time-slots (2Mbit).This might be a good read for you:
http://www.asteriskguru.com/tutorials/e1t1.htmlSo you would need a card you can plug into your pfSense which is capable of encoding/decoding the E1/T1 datastream.
Additionally you would have to be able to configure pfSense to acutally use this card.Afaik this is not supported in the webgui.
"maybe" if you can find hardware and drivers for FreeBSD you could hack yourself something together. -
Mpd that is used for the drivers iirc correctly can decode these protocols too.
Though you will need the card or does the modem that comes from the provider with something that can be plugged into a computer like usb or else?Afaik the only difference from standard dial out is on the speed achived by the time slot at ppp layer.
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I've googled that a Sangoma A101D Wanpipe E1 card will work as WAN interface but it was done using Vyatta, will this work with pfSense, according to Sangoma, FreeBSD is supported, I suppose that since pfSense came from FreeBSD it will work too. Does anyone ever tried this?
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There was some discussion of this a while back. http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,4628.0.html
At the moment, you will need another piece of equipment, unless that modem has ethernet.