Talk:FXO and FXS

is it foreign exchange station or subscriber?
I have a document called "3com ip telephony acronyms and glossary" that says fxs means foreign exchange subscriber. Which one is it? [[User:Family Guy

Topic Confusion
The "Foreign eXchange Office" section of this article and everything after it are actually talking about a different topic than Foreign Exchange service. The FXO/FXS stuff is good information to have somewhere on Wikipedia but are not related to the subject of this article. Unless someone else does it for me in the next couple weeks or so, I'll probably create or edit whatever article(s) is/are necessary for the FXO/FXS discussion, and edit this article to concern itself only with foreign exchange service.

DrDeke (talk) 00:49, 2 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Indeed, that does make the article hard to follow because of the manner that the two concepts seem to be mixed or muddled together here. An "FX line" (back in the bad old days before voice-over-Internet) was a way for a subscriber who geographically is in a suburban exchange to get a number with the full calling area of the larger adjacent city. Markham (+1-905) was long-distance to Mississauga, Ontario (also +1-905) but both are local to Toronto (+1-416), for instance, so the Toronto number would be more desirable for business and marketing purposes. Unfortunately, the telcos charged $200/month for such a line in the 1980's, most likely because its existence was somehow depriving them of revenue for overpriced toll calls between what basically were two suburbs on different sides of the same town (Mississauga is just across the county line, out by the airport).


 * With VoIP, geography is irrelevant... a host is a host from coast to coast, so there's nothing stopping a subscriber in Australia from getting a Toronto number if they wanted one for some fool reason. A lot of the FXO/FXS stuff applies to voice-over-Internet hardware, where the concept of a "foreign exchange" or a "local exchange" largely doesn't exist except on the POTS side. 66.102.83.61 (talk) 05:16, 3 April 2012 (UTC)
 * @DrDeke bit of a late reply, but I have changed the introduction of the article to something better in my view. Do you think it looks good? PhotographyEdits (talk) 11:13, 17 June 2024 (UTC)