[Asterisk-Users] CE certification for Europe

[Steve Underwood]

Unless things have simplified since I was last involved in European 
approvals (which is quite a long time) things are worse than that. If 
your factory has not previously produced approved telecoms products, you 
probably need to pay for a factory inspection; each new protocol you 
want to support needs its own approvals testing of the software; the 
software drivers must be locked down against uncontrolled changes; your 
own changes require some level of reapproval; etc. The list can get 
quite long and painful, unless you are producing a series of products 
and can get into the proper swing of things. If you only want CTR4 the 
protocol list might not be a problem. On the driver side you can look at 
the i4l stuff and see what they had to do to get a driver through 
approvals for dumb BRI ISDN cards - and every tiny change means some 
level of reapproval.

The US used to be comparable, but these days approval there may not even 
be necessary. It depends how you read the rules. Approving the hardware 
certainly makes life easier, though. Getting UL and FCC approval for the 
hardware seems to be all that is needed. The protocols don't seem to 
need any approvals.

The figures the original poster quoted seem much cheaper than any real 
approval I have seen go through. It sounds like he hasn't been through 
the approvals minefield before. It can be a slow and costly place to 
navigate for the beginner.

Regards,
Steve


Klaus-Peter Junghanns wrote:

>Hi d hintion,
>
>hmmm...getting approvals for europe isnt that easy.
>because you get the approval for a combination of hardware
>and driver software, so when you change the driver you loose
>the approval.
>
>oh yes, sure you can produce the cards and sell them cheaper,
>but that doesnt take the development time of the zaptel drivers
>into account. opening up a competition against digium based on
>their software and GPLed hardware design doesnt sound good to me .....
>rather sounds like M$ style to me.
>
>regards
>kapejod
>  
>