[Asterisk-Dev] TDM120 card?

[John Todd]

At 4:41 PM +0100 on 12/19/04, Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk wrote:
>hi
>
>any chance of making asterisk support these?
>
>http://voipstore.atacomm.com/shops/ViewItem.aspx/27934028032-38356249088.htm
>
>roy

My strong suspicion is that these cards will work with Asterisk 
"out-of-the-box".  However, until I can order one and get it in my 
hands and plug it into one of my test boxes... it's vapor.   I've 
seen quite a few miracle products that somehow have something to do 
with Asterisk, on this list and on -users, and especially on the IRC 
channel.  Only rarely do they actually ever see the light of day.

However, I am encouraged to see the at least the discussion of the 
appearance of a DSP-enabled card that handles transcoding and echo 
cancellation.  This may be a big step forward for those of us that 
(unfortunately) are still handing off PRI channels in bulk to various 
TDM carriers.  I'm a big proponent of "software" doing the work of 
hardware, but as I've mentioned before in this forum, we're still not 
quite there on the price/performance curve.  At $995 for 120 
channels, this is still a bit ahead of Moore's Law (when compared to 
the price of staying at the edge of Moore's Law.)

How does this relate to the -dev list?  Well, good question.  If 
these cards are effective, then perhaps it is the case that three of 
them could be installed in a single chassis.  That's (240*3=720) 
channels in a single box - let's say a 2x3.2ghz Xeon.  Are there any 
limits that we start to encounter with Zap's ability to deal with 
that many channels?  With the addition of an AdTran or other M13 type 
mux, this is a "poor man's DS3" adapter, without the effort of 
creating a Zap driver for a completely new board set.

(PS: Responses to this thread should not start discussing price or 
politics of G.7[*] licenses; I'm tired of hearing about that topic.)


JT