You need a tone-clock board to supply timing for the system to syncronize things like the TDM bus. It also generates the tones needed by the system (ie Touch tones, answer-back, call progress, trunk transmission test)
A TN2182x is a Tone-Clock, Tone Detector, and Call Classifier card all in one.
A TN2182x is more expensive than the plain TN2182x Tone-Clock board.
If you have an EPN, you'll have a tone-clock in that too.
For high reliability, you'd have a tone-clock in each PPN (carrier A, carrier B)
If you are using a predictive dialer, ie: Easyphone from Altitude, then you want some call-classifier cards too.
The dialer, in predictive mode, will make calls and use the call-classifier cards to detect voice energy.
Here are some options for you to play with:
Change System-Parameters Features - ASAI (somewhere on page 8 to 10)
Call Classification after Answer Supervision:
Set to Y, this tells the switch only to use a call classifier port after it has established a telco connection (ie called party answered). Durring ringing, with busies, etc, a call classifier port is not used.
Set to N, the switch will reserve a CC port as it makes the call. If the call turns out to be busy, or it keeps ringing, the CC port is still reserved until the call is disconnected. This uses more ports, but ensures that you have a port available for classification. It also seems that call classification is a tad better as it may detect faster but this was never confirmed by Avaya or Altitude. It's just something of a gut feeling I had.
In the end, I left it to Y, otherwise I kept running out of ports.
Change Sit-Treatment:
SIT Ineffective Other: dropped
SIT Intercept: dropped
SIT No Circuit: dropped
SIT Reorder: dropped
SIT Vacant Code: dropped
SIT Unknown: dropped
AMD Treatment: answered
Pause Duration (seconds): 0.7
Talk Duration (seconds): 1.5
AMD is answering machine detect. You want it answered. Then in your Easyphone Telephony Gateway setup- Lucent TSAPI, you can elect to have Answering Machines Disconnect or not.
As best I can figure, Pause Duration is detectnig blank, talk durration is voice energy.
If a person answers a phone and says "Thank you for calling XYZ Corporation of America. My name is John Smith in the Accounting Department, how may I be of assistance". And they say this fast enough without a 0.7 pause and it lasts longer than 1.5 seconds, then it detects as an answering machine. So for campaigns to companies either go power dial or set your gateway to not disconnect machines, and put a "answering machine" button in your Master of the script.
In a scenario where you have both business and residential campaigns, then you'd want to set up a 2nd gateway. 1 with machine disconnect, one without.
Use "list measurements tone" to find out your port usage.
Hope this helps, this took us about 6 months of testing and a whole lot of sleepless nights to figure out.