[Asterisk-Users] VoIP-to-TDM processing on-card?

[Steven Critchfield]

While it will probably be handled when you move out of outlook, please
wrap your lines at a reasonable length.

On Thu, 2005-01-20 at 15:30 -0500, Olson, Dana wrote:
> Actually, I do care, and I did search Google (albeit quickly) and I
> did look on the hardware list as well as the VoIP wiki. Maybe one of
> the cards listed there does what I need, but it wasn't listed like the
> QuickNet cards are. I thought perhaps the feature list on the site
> would be consistent, but apparently not. The fact that the hardware
> list on the Asterisk site does not include the Sangoma cards shows
> that it's not a complete list of supported hardware.

As of right now, I don't think the sangoma card supports any codec
conversions and asterisk support at the same time. I say this as it
supports the zaptel api and therefore should work similarly as the TE
cards from Digium as far as asterisk is concerned. 

Also I don't see that the Wanpipe hardware supports codec translations
either.

I may be wrong on that though.

> I don't understand what was so bad about my question. I thought it was
> direct and to the point, but apparently I left a lot of guesswork? A
> few people managed to actually answer my question - how did they do
> it?

It wasn't so much that your question was bad, but it didn't show that
you had the proper understanding of the question. If you had stated
which sites/URLs you had searched through to come to the conclusion that
there might be a reason the list would be more authoritative that those
URLs, it would have shown effort and therefore reason to be respected.
You will find that even in supposedly rough groups, effort is respected.
Few like freeloaders. Your question seemed like it was only about you
having others do your work. The extra couple of lines you would have
typed to show a bit of your previous effort would have sufficed to
eliminate that appearance.

> I'm sorry about the disclaimer, it is automatically added to any email
> that goes outside of our Exchange server. I'll get a new email account
> to use, as suggested by Steven. I won't email from this account again
> after this. I agree that it's annoying, but I fail to see how this
> makes me "lazy."

I'm not sure the disclaimer itself shows anything other than a stupid
policy by your employer. At some point your employer should actually
seek legal advice as to whether or not the disclaimer does any good at
all. I could disagree with it and therefore not be bound by it. As the
majority of the world isn't in any form of business agreements with your
employer, there isn't much you could do to compel others to abide by it.

> And to Timothy, who just wrote back to my original question, the
> reason I don't want the TE cards is that the processing is done on the
> system CPU and not on the card itself. I already have one of the TE
> cards though, and will make due if it comes to that.

Right now, I don't think there is any support for other codecs on TDM
cards. There is however discussions about using GPUs for codecs though.

When it comes down to it, reasonable hardware should handle decent
amounts of codec translations. If you are trying to stuff more than the
suggested amount of TE hardware in a box and do codec translation, then
you need to rethink the cost of failure. If you are dependant on 12 T1s
(value pulled from thin air, not necessarily related), You should see
about spitting it out over 3 boxes so at most you only lose 4 T1s at a
time. For most companies that rely on the phones, losing 1/3rd of the
production is pretty expensive, losing  all of production is not
tolerable. Any card that does the codec translation for you will
probably make you more likely to consolidate too many interfaces into
one machine.

-- 
Steven Critchfield <critch at basesys.com>