[asterisk-users] Sangoma vs Digium: (was Re: ping too)

[Jared Smith]

On Fri, 2007-10-05 at 11:32 -0400, Steve Totaro wrote:
> I used to buy Digium products until they let me down with all kinds of 
> quirky behavior with regards to echo, clicks, "incompatible 
> motherboards" and IRQ issues.

(Let me take off my Digium hat for a minute and speak as a community
member, and not as a Digium employee.  The opinions expressed below are
my own, and not Digium's.)

I'll be the first to admit that Digium has made some design mistakes on
some of their cards in the past.  And since I've been doing Asterisk
consulting and also teaching Asterisk Bookcamp classes for the past two
and a half years, I've seen Digium hardware installed on a wide variety
of motherboards.  I'm happy to report that I haven't had any motherboard
or IRQ incompatibility with any of Digium's newer cards that use their
VoiceBus technology.  In some ways, I think Digium hasn't said enough
about their efforts to fix the problems of the past and to make sure
that their products are rock solid.  So if anything, I've gotta stand up
for Digium a little bit here and say "Yes, they've had problems in the
past.  But you shouldn't discount the effort they're making to change
that."

That being said, I've also had the opportunity to spend a lot of time
using hardware from most of the other board vendors.  For the most part,
they've worked OK for me and my clients, but they aren't perfect either.
The biggest problems have been related to drivers (either drivers that
are buggy, or won't work with the latest version of Zaptel or the
kernel).  Obviously in a perfect world the third-party drivers would be
integrated right into Zaptel, and the zaptel drivers would all be pushed
upstream into the Linux kernel.  Until that happens, we're going to
continue to have these sorts of problems to a certain extent.  (I also
have a philosophical problem with certain of the smaller-scale board
vendors that basically do a lot of taking from the community and don't
give anything back, but that's another topic for another day.)

I should also mention that I strongly believe that competition (or maybe
co-opmetition?) helps keep the world progressing and keeps all the
players on their toes.  At the same time, I believe there's been more
than enough mud-slinging both in this list and in other venues, and we
should be able to each make our own decision on the boards based on
their technical merits, and not on vague generalities or past mistakes.

-Jared Smith