Phone interoperability Europe-Canada

[Matt London]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 04:15:29PM +0200, Slack Rat wrote:
>   
>> This request is for landline telephones and not cellular telephones
>> ("mobiles" or "handys" to most europeans) where one only has to juggle
>> SIM Cards - supposing they have a quad band telephone.
>>
>> But is it possible that a European Land Line telephone set might work
>> when connected to a Canadian phone service provider please?
>>
>> I wasn't able to find anything on the net
>>     
>
> Well given there are modems that work almost everywhere in the world,
> I don't see why it shouldn't be possible, given the right plug adapter.
> It may however not be legal.  Some countries have strict regulations on
> what can and can not be connected to a phone line (Australia is completely
> paranoid for example, and the UK is up there too).
>
>   
I was going to say much the same thing. Technically I don't think there
should be any issue using a phone in another country, with the exception
of the connector used to plug it into the wall.

As Lennart mentioned, some countries are particularly picky - in the UK
for example, BT won't allow you to connect a device to their network if
it's not BABT approved (there'll be a logo on the bottom of the phone if
it is). I remember getting a multi-country modem at one point which had
a little booklet attached to the cable with all the various telecoms
approvals it had.

The only other thing I can think of that might cause issue are ring
voltages, which do vary from place to place - but chances are if you can
plug it into a VoIP ATA and have it ring, you'll be good. This is more
the case in the terms of the old rotary phones where the ringer is a
real bell and takes a decent amount of power to drive the ringer. In the
UK phones carry a Ringer Equivalence Number (REN), and BT don't support
driving more than 4 REN on a single line.

-- 
Matt
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists