[Asterisk-Users] My Sangoma Experience in Asterisk: Followup

[mattf]

My Sangoma Experience in Asterisk: Followup
2005-05-06
  original review can be found at:
  http://astguiclient.sourceforge.net/Sangoma_experience.txt


It's now been a month since I finished my last round of tests with the
Sangoma A104u board in Asterisk. I have had a lot of conversations with the
guys at Sangoma about how my system runs so that they could set up their
test systems to try to replicate my problems. They seem to take it very
personally that their card did not work well for me and have been working on
all sorts of fixes and improvements to the wanpipe drivers and the firmware
for the boards in the last several weeks.  Here's a summary of what they've
done: 
 - D4/AMI circuits now work fully with Sangoma cards
 - RBS E&M Wink start circuits now work under full load
 - Created a new Hardware HDLC PRI D-channel implementation that runs more
efficiently
 - For the A104 cards they have created a TDMV driver to streamline the
voice data path to offer better scalability

 The first two made me very happy because I was now able to fully run the
Sangoma card under full production load with D4/AMI and Wink start T1s. To
upgrade to the new software I had to first upgrade the firmware on the A104
card. Sangoma includes the firmware as well as a loader with the wanpipe
drivers. Upgrading the board firmware was actually very easy, just start the
firmware loader script(wan_aftup), select the board, pick the firmware file
to update to and it's done in a couple minutes, and you don't even have to
reboot.

 As for the driver software, Sangoma had changed a few things in the last
month(including a new installation README for asterisk). First, for the
optimized HDLC to work you now have to re-compile zaptel after you finish
your wanpipe installation(not a big deal). Second, you now have to configure
your wanpipe spans differently depending on whether it is a PRI circuit or a
RBS circuit(by selecting the DCHAN in the wancfg utility per span). Third,
now the wancfg utility can setup the startup order of the spans, taking away
an extra step that you previously had to do.

 After finishing the installation and getting Asterisk back up and running I
tried both a D4/AMI circuit and an E&M Wink start circuit and found they
both worked well. Then I put some test traffic through all four T1 ports and
again everything went well. Now it was time to put the server into
production and unlike last time, it ran without any problems all day. The
performance results ended up as I expected: For our production environment a
30-50% reduced system load leading to higher capacity on the server than was
possible with the Digium TE405P board.

 Another piece of news that came out in the last month was that Digium will
be shipping the TE406p in May 2005(a 405 with an echo-canceller daughtercard
that will retail for $2,195). I would very much like to get my hands on one
of these to test it's performance against the Sangoma A104 to see what kind
of impact off-loading the echo-canceller and DTMF detection really has for
one of these cards.

 In the last month I have learned a little more about Sangoma and Asterisk.
Sangoma has given money and has been donating code to the Asterisk community
for some time now. They also have given money to other fledgling telephony
projects such as Yate (http://yate.null.ro/pmwiki/).

 In light of the improvements made in the last month and the reliability
I've seen in the system I've been running for the last month with a Sangoma
card in it, I would now recommend Sangoma cards for just about anyone except
for Linux/Asterisk novices. The configuration might be a bit confusing for a
newbie especially when compared to the ease of popping in a Digium single T1
board and going right to the Asterisk install. Other than that, Sangoma
boards are now to the point where they can be used by just about any T1/E1
user in all types of environments.

 This has been another step forward by Sangoma in the battle of the Asterisk
telco boards, but Digium has also been busy on another front recently,
developing their new channelized DS3 card. It will be interesting to see how
this card and the new TE406p perform as well as to see what new cards come
out from Sangoma in the next year. And as always I say, competition is a
good thing.


MATT---