ISDN Cards

[Matthias Heidbrink]

Hi,

On Fri, Apr 04, 2003 at 02:22:09PM +0200, Brad wrote:
> Could someone please confirm if an internal terminal adapter will work with i4b?

It won't. The only difference between an internal and an external TA is that on 
the internal one, the UART (serial interface chip) is on the same card as the TA.
If your internal TA has got an UART that is supported by your BSD system, you can 
use the standard PPP stuff like you would do with an modem. 

Just to make this difference clear:
A modem or a TA, may it be internal or external, is an intelligent device that
can do the line protocol (be it analogue or ISDN) on its own and offers a serial 
interface for high-level commands and data to the computer.

An ISDN card is usually quite a dumb device that offers not much more than a 
hardware interface between the ISDN bus and the combuter's internal bus. Most of 
the ISDN protocol and an API for applications must be offered by the drivers. 
This task (and a lot more) is what I4b is for. The problem that is solved by i4b
simply does not exist if you use a TA, so there's no way to use i4b with a TA.

Hope that this finally answers all your questions ;-) .

Ciao, Matthias