Phone interoperability Europe-Canada

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 11:31:09AM -0400, Matt London wrote:
> 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.

Australia's certifications seem to require almost background radiation
level noise limits on telephone equipment.  Getting things certified is
very hard and requires very careful design.

> 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.

Canada has such ratings too.  In canada the total of the ratings of
the phones can not exceed 100.  That is supposed to be about 5 phones.
Some cheap crap phones had ratings of 30 to 40 in some cases, while much
better phones are often down around 5 or 10.

The USA has a REN limit of 5.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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