I've got the Sangoma B600D analog telephone interface card working with Asterisk. Yay!
The B600D was $542+shipping from TelephonyWare in Concord California. It performs signficantly better than the eBay "ChinaRoby" card it replaced. The B600D ( 4*FXO connections to telco, 1*FXS connection to deskset or fax ) has digital hardware echo cancellation. The B600D comes with a 30 day "no questions asked" return policy, and a five year warranty. They also have real live humans answering their support email, like the fellow who composed a one page response to the three support questions I asked. One unadvertised coolness is that the 2 double FXO jacks light up with red LEDs, and the FXS with a green LED. If your phone server is stuffed into a dark corner, this makes it much easier to plug the right cords into the right jacks. Since connecting an FXS jack to a telco jack (also FXS) zaps the card, this is a Good Thing. One advertised so-so feature are the two split cables in the box, which can connect the two 2*FXO jacks on the card to four single telco jacks. The cables are only 6 feet long, too short without extenders, and a lot of wires to deal with. I built my own cable, starting with 10 feet of CAT6 and crimping two four-wire RJ11s on one end and four two-wire RJ11s on the other. Much less messy, and no extra connection blocks in between. You might think that a lightly loaded dual core Pentium with the highly-regarded OSLEC driver ought to be able to do software echo cancellation for a cheap card, but we've had no end of trouble with strangely sounding calls, especially connecting to cell phones. The Sangoma folks understand echo cancellation, which is why customers pay $$$ for their products. The echo cancellation firmware for the FPGA on the card is closed source (sigh), but all their drivers and setup software is open source, built from source tar files. Install note: The Sangoma "wanpipe" software expects to modify the dahdi driver and associated configurations. The "./Setup" command in the wanpipe source directory does all the work, including installing the rc.d files on redhat-derived systems (probably also for debian-derived). It ignores the fxotune (line and card calibration) information for other cards; however, it does overwrite the /etc/asterisk/chan_dahdi.conf file, losing the extent and group information. While ./Setup saves the old file as /etc/asterisk/chan_dahdi.conf.bak, you may lose that if you ./Setup twice. I prefer to "cp -a" old file versions to [filename].YYYYMMDD[what_it_did] , and I do have backups of them, but still, I would prefer that the install software was smarter about preserving prior information. After repairing the file, I did a "chattr +i chan_dahdi.conf" so it won't be overwritten again. If you want a professional quality connection between Asterisk and four inbound telco lines, this is a great card. If enough of us get these cards, I propose that we pool some money and purchase one local spare, which we can immediately substitute for a failed card until Sangoma replaces it under the 5 year warranty. Cross-border shipping to Toronto might be slow. Thanks to Bill Ensley for suggesting Sangoma, and the others who've helped me with suggestions and deployment. Next, I learn how to set up the programmable buttons and lamp fields on the Aastra phones I bought. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected] Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
