System information

America (we don’t recommend using it for any reason), but in some countries in Europe
it is widely used and has almost completely replaced analog.
BRI support under Asterisk will be different depending on the BRI card you are instal-
ling. The manufacturer of your BRI card will provide specific installation instructions
for its hardware.
When installing telephony hardware, be sure you update the /etc/dahdi/
modules file to enable the appropriate modules for your hardware and
then reload DAHDI with the init script (/etc/init.d/dahdi). You can use
the dahdi_genconf modules command to generate the modules file for
your system as well.
The MFC/R2 protocol could be thought of as a precursor to ISDN. It was at
first used on analog circuits, but it is now mostly deployed on the same E1 circuits that
also carry ISDN-PRI. This protocol is not typically found in Canada, the US, or Western
Europe, but it is very popular in some parts of the world (especially Latin America and
Asia), mostly because it tends to be a less expensive service offering from the carriers.
There are many different flavors of this protocol, each country having a different re-
gional variant.
The OpenR2 project provides the libopenr2 library, which needs to be installed on your
system in order for Asterisk to support your R2 circuits. Before installing libopenr2,
however, you need to have DAHDI installed.
The compilation and installation order, therefore, is:
1. DAHDI
2. libopenr2
3. Asterisk
Once OpenR2 has been installed, you can use the r2test application to see a list of
variants that are supported:
$ r2test -l
Variant Code Country
AR Argentina
BR Brazil
CN China
CZ Czech Republic
CO Colombia
EC Ecuador
ITU International Telecommunication Union
MX Mexico
PH Philippines
VE Venezuela
For additional information on configuring R2 support in Asterisk, see the configs/
chan_dahdi.conf.sample file included in the Asterisk source tree (search for “mfcr2”).
MFC/R2.
PSTN Circuits | 141