[Asterisk-Users] CE certification for Europe

[Mark Spencer]

> first off the majority of work on the cards was made by zapata guys, let's
> give them the credit. secondly are you talking about hardward support or
> asterisk software support?

Wrong.  The Tormenta2 was truly a joint venture between us.  Digium
*totally* funded its development, *and* I personally did most of the
driver work.  The zaptel engine was totally rewritten from the original
tor.c driver.  Just compare what is//was on the zapata site with what is
in CVS and see for yourself.

> also we're getting off base here, my intent was NOT to bash digium for their
> prices but rather find a way to get people without the huge budget of a
> great company like yours, to be able to add to the project in a meaningful
> way. few can at the current pricing schema, that's why the original makers
> sold it at ~$250 USD and released it GPL in the first place. just my two
> cents

The original torisa was a very different beast.  The BOM was substantially
less expensive, it only used a two layer board, and it was hand built by
Dude.  There is a reason you can't buy them anymore.  The Tormenta 2 has
to be done with surface mount, had a very substantial capital investment
in producing it, not to mention all the additional driver work, and has
received FCC certification (which presumably you would not be providing in
your knock-off board -- and no, Digium's certs don't extend to you).

When volumes increase, we will be in a better position to try to reduce
cost (and thus price).  Right now, the quantities of boards being moved
are very small (on the scale of things) and we have priced ourselves
extremely competitively compared with existing product offerings.  We're
focusing on building a good support and development infrastructure, and
it's a lot of hard work.

Digium has operated unlike essentially any other telecom company.  We have
released all our drivers and software under Open Source licensing -- on an
architecture in which almost all the real logic lies in the software.  We
have tried to be as open as possible, in spite of the risks that we open
ourselves up to.

We know we will not always be the low cost leader -- we can't do that and
at the same time pour as much into Asterisk as we do, and to do so would
be suicide.  In order to continue to build our hardware revenues, we will
have to defend our position with quality of product and support, and
through the loyalty of customers who, like Steven, see real value in what
we are doing and see the long term value in supporting us as a company.

Mark