[Asterisk-Users] Quad T1 Card

[Steve Underwood]

Michael Collins wrote:

>Kevin P. Fleming wrote:
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>>According the Sangoma data sheet, the Octasic part _is_ the DSP (which
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>it
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>>is, in a logical sense). The board does not relieve Asterisk/Zaptel of
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>any
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>>additional burden beyond echo cancellation and tone detection at this
>>time; Asterisk/Zaptel don't know how to take advantage of any of the
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>more
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>>advanced Octasic features yet.
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>"Yet" being the key word.  Digium is wise to take advantage of
>on-board/hardware DSP where possible.  Many so-called "high-end" card
>manufacturers (e.g. Natural Microsystems) have DSP built right on to
>their cards.  As a consumer using two separate systems that use these
>"high-end" cards I can tell you that there is an industry bias against
>"the little guy with no DSP on his T1 card."  (This bias reminds me of
>the Microsoft snobbery against Linux in the late 1990's.)  Some industry
>players, including vendors who create apps using these high-end T1
>cards, think that a Digium or Sangoma card without DSP on the card
>itself is just a toy.  Their thinking is like, "Well my NMS Quad T1
>board costs US$15000 - it must be WAY better than a $2500 card from
>Digium/Sangoma/whomever."  Now that Sangoma, with Digium hot on their
>heels, have T1 cards with some on-board muscle, it is getting more
>difficult for the big boys to dismiss "those annoying open-source
>geeks."  (Just like Linux, eh?)
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Cards like Dialogic and NMS actually have very little DSP processing 
power on them. There are only a few CTI cards made today with any 
serious processing power on them, and those are not made by the likes of 
NMS, Dialogic, Pika, etc.

We've been doing host processing since 1999. Suddenly we're sexy.:-) In 
the last year everyone in CTI, and a number of newcomers, have launched 
HMP products. I think it was Intel who coined that term. How everyone 
wants to be on the Host Media Processing bandwagon, many with rather 
half baked thrown together aggolomerations of a few random DSP 
functions. Seems like the industry is following us. We may need to put 
some serious compute on these boards, for EC and transcoding, but most 
things are working just fine on the host CPU.

>>And yes, when Digium's Octasic-based module starts shipping (currently
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>in
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>>beta testing), it will offer the identical functionality, so I guess
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>we
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>>can say our boards have 'DSP processing' too :-)
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>Again, a good thing to put on the sales collateral, if for no other
>reason than it lets potential clients know that Digium/Asterisk can play
>with the big boys.  I definitely like it.  On-board DSP has advantages
>in higher-end applications where clients are willing to spend $, whereas
>the "dumb" cards also have a wide range of applications that will fill
>the needs of the budget conscious consumer.
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But the high dollars don't generally get you the high processing power, 
or a solid quality product (cough, Dialogic, cough).

>Kudos to Digium on this one!  Keep us posted on the progress - I think
>this will be a quantum leap forward for the open-source telephony
>community.
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Steve