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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>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.<br>
<br>Michael Cargile<br>Director of Consulting<br>The Vicidial Group<br><a href="http://www.vicidial.com">www.vicidial.com</a><br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Apr 6, 2008 at 9:55 AM, Jay R. Ashworth <<a href="mailto:jra@baylink.com">jra@baylink.com</a>> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">On Sun, Apr 06, 2008 at 05:37:03AM -0400, Steve Totaro wrote:<br>
> > There was a fundamental problem with the chipset used, which precluded the<br>
> > card from being useful. Specifically, the chipset only permitted the first<br>
> > 255 channels to be addressed (instead of the full 672). Since that time,<br>
> > and<br>
> > partly due to this circumstance, Digium no longer announces the release of<br>
> > cards until they are ready to be shipped, with drivers and all.<br>
> ><br>
> Would that be 254? Seems like 254 is always the cap.<br>
<br>
I would bet cash that it's 256 channels, numbered 0-255.<br>
<br>
The limit is 8 bits of address.<br>
<br>
Cheers,<br>
-- jra<br>
--<br>
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink <a href="mailto:jra@baylink.com">jra@baylink.com</a><br>
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100<br>
Ashworth & Associates <a href="http://baylink.pitas.com" target="_blank">http://baylink.pitas.com</a> '87 e24<br>
St Petersburg FL USA <a href="http://photo.imageinc.us" target="_blank">http://photo.imageinc.us</a> +1 727 647 1274<br>
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