Upgrading the PAP2T ATA
A short while ago my girlfriend and I ported our home land line number over to our sip terminator. I have had a Linksys PAP2T Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) for some time, but mostly used it as a lab device for mucking around.
When we made the switch to full time sip, I started using the ATA as the main extension for the inbound ported number.
One thing I found that I didn’t care for was the ring cadence. It doesn’t sound like a typical North American ring that my North American ears are used to, so I set out to figure out how to change that.
After poking around in the web interface of the ATA a bit, and googling about, I noticed the interface didn’t contain inputs that others were claiming to have changed. I figured I needed a firmware upgrade, and I was right. According to Wikipedia
As of 8/21/09 the latest PAP2T firmware is 5.1.6 released 11/21/2007.
I was running Firmware Version: 3.1.15(LS) . Heh, so a little out of date.
Upgrading was simple, however I followed a really long route to get there.
First thing is to grab the lastest firmware from Cisco, and place it on an available web server (or tftp for that matter).
Then log into the web ui of the PAP2T, and click the (switch to advanced view) link, and then click the Provisioning tab at the top.
Find the dialog box for Firmware Upgrading, and set Upgrade Enable to Yes and then set the upgrade rule like I have it here, but using your ip/domain and path for the file:
The (<5.1.6)? portion of the rule tells the PAP2T to not download the firmware unless it’s running an earlier version than that. The rest of the rule is simply the protocol and path to get the file (you can also use tftp if you desire, just change the protocol to tftp://)
Then unplug the ATA and let it come back up. Since this was on my lan, it took less than 10 seconds to come back up and be usable with the new firmware.
After all that, log back into the web ui, confirm the upgrade, navigate again to the Advanced View, then the Regional tab, and finally, change the Ring Waveform from Trapezoid to Sinusoid, and Save Settings one last time.
Violin! You should now have an approximation of the North American ring.
Happy hacking!
What sound does the ring cadence affect? Is it the rhythm of the ringing that the in-house phones make, or the “the other phone is ringing” noise that the caller hears when they call you? Just wondering if you could do some extra cool stuff with the ring cadence, like some special rhythm that identifies specific callers, like a custom ringtone on a cell phone.
Heh, I see I still have no smtp on here to send me an email when I get a comment…rats :)
Anyway, it affects what I hear in the house, not the caller. And yes it has Distinctive Rings settings.