[Asterisk-Users] Quad T1 Card

[Matt Florell]

Hello,

I have done a lot of testing on both the Digium TE406P and the Sangoma
a104d and was involved in debugging both of them with Digium and
Sangoma in their early releases.

Since we are on a Digium-owned list right now and I don't want to be
branded an "enemy of Asterisk" again for suggesting that you might
consider buying a non-Digium product, I will mention right up front
that a large portion of your purchase price from buying a Digium card
will go toward keeping Asterisk development going, in fact it is how
Digium makes most of their money and allows them to have dozens of
programmers working full time on Asterisk. Sangoma does contribute to
the Asterisk codebase, but buying a Sangoma card will not help the
owner of Asterisk further improve their product at all.

Now on to my recommendation. As I mentioned we have had both the
Digium and Sangoma echo-cancellation cards in production for over 6
months on heavy load Asterisk servers running both 1.2.X Asterisk.
Both had initial problems with drivers with the Sangoma side being
fixed within a couple weeks and the Digium side being fixed by having
to manually disable the hardware DTMF detection in the wct4xxp.c
driver code every time I upgrade zaptel.

Both of the cards do a good job at removing echo from our calls, and
they both have a fairly equal effect of reducing the overall load on
your system(10-20%). So performance-wise in our tests in our
environment they are pretty much the same.

As for the technical specs on the echo-cancellation modules used, the
Sangoma card uses an Octastic chipset that is highly configurable and
is one of the best telecom echo-cancellation chipsets in the industry.
Is has a configurable tail length and is capable of dynamically being
turned on and off as needed by it's firmware. The Digium card uses an
Oki chipset that has a smaller echo tail length and is hard-coded into
the firmware so you cannot change it.

The other differences are just the usual differences between Digium
and Sangoma cards:
Digium - ready to go just loading zaptel and Asteirsk, Sangoma - must
load wanpipe drivers and configure each span before using, also must
recompile zaptel after installing/upgrading wanpipe driver
Digium - 2 year warranty, Sangoma 5 year warranty
Digium - has motherboard incompatibility list, Sangoma - guarantees
functionality with all modern PCI-compliant motherboards

Hope that helps,

MATT---



On 6/7/06, Rich Adamson <radamson at routers.com> wrote:
> Sean Cook wrote:
> >> One of the primary differences between the two cards is the Sangoma
> >> h/w echo canceler handles more cases of echo then do the Digium cards.
> >> Whether you need that additional coverage is 100% dependent on your
> >> specific implementation (eg, your T1/PRI provider), and not on what
> >> the list thinks about the two products.
> >>
> >> Since there are no affordable tools to truly quantify echo for each
> >> specific implementation, as a pbx engineer your toolkit should
> >> probably include both cards. Sort of like try the less expensive card
> >> and if it doesn't address your echo issues, then try the more
> >> expensive one.
> >>
> >
> > No offense but isn't that like saying .... "Don't take what the list has
> > to say about your purchase... instead you should guess and hope you get
> > the right answer... but if you don't, gamble again and buy two cards?"
>
> The list cannot guess at what level of echo "you" are going to incur,
> therefore there is no way for anyone to accurately tell you how to
> address issues. Both cards are quality products, but with slightly
> different operational characteristics.
>
> If you can't afford to purchase both cards, then a safe bet is to simply
> purchase the Sangoma card since it can address more echo issues then the
> Digium card.
>
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