[asterisk-users] Where is the Digium DS3 card?

[Michael Cargile]

Another reason I am sure that Digium has not released a DS3 TDM card is the
fact that asterisk currently cannot handle that many channels. I am speaking
from experience on this. We have build before a predictive dialer with 16
PRIs. In order to do this and not have audio quality issues we had to use an
8 core Intel Xeon server with 16 gigs of ram, a 6 drive RAID 10, and two
octal echo canceling Sangoma cards. This also required numerous OS tweaks
and dial plan optimizations. The amount of time spend on this was not worth
the final product.

This is not to say that Asterisk will not be able to support this in the
future. In the 1.6 tree, they have change a number of core data structures
and the type of locking used around them which should allow far more
channels to pass through Asterisk with much lower load. I would not even
attempt this though till somewhere around the 1.6.5 release so that the vast
majority of the bugs can be worked out.

In the mean time, if someone really needs to handle that many channels I
would suggest purchasing a DS3 to T1 mux and pass the T1s onto mutliple
Asterisk servers setup in a cluster. In the end you will end up spending far
less money and time setting the system up. I also saw recently at a trade
show a DS3 to SIP converter which might also lower the cost as you would not
need T1 cards. The only issue is that they are a some what new technology
where as DS3 to T1 muxes have been around for some years now and can be
found on ebay for around 700 dollars.

Michael Cargile
Director of Consulting
The Vicidial Group
www.vicidial.com


On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 9:55 AM, Jay R. Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 06, 2008 at 05:37:03AM -0400, Steve Totaro wrote:
> > > There was a fundamental problem with the chipset used, which precluded
> the
> > > card from being useful.  Specifically, the chipset only permitted the
> first
> > > 255 channels to be addressed (instead of the full 672).  Since that
> time,
> > > and
> > > partly due to this circumstance, Digium no longer announces the
> release of
> > > cards until they are ready to be shipped, with drivers and all.
> > >
> > Would that be 254?  Seems like 254 is always the cap.
>
> I would bet cash that it's 256 channels, numbered 0-255.
>
> The limit is 8 bits of address.
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra
> --
> Jay R. Ashworth                   Baylink
> jra at baylink.com
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>
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