Re: [Asterisk-Users] My Sangoma Experience - Review
Bravo - nice writeup Matt! It concisely captures both the pros and cons. Seems that we really do have (or are close to having) a second source now - and all asterisk users will benefit in my opinion! Cheers Scott Stingel www.evtmedia.com mattf wrote: My Sangoma Experience in Asterisk: 2005-04-07 Having pushed my Digium Asterisk systems to their capacity many times and figuring out the limits of the Digium hardware I decided it was time to test an Asterisk-compatible Sangoma Quad T1/E1 card(AFT-A104u) to see if they live up to their hype of being more efficient than the Digium variety(T405P). I had talked with someone from Sangoma before at Astricon, but it was rather informal, he didn't have any literature and I was rather swamped at the time as it was. Then I saw a posting on the asterisk-users list about the claims that the Sangoma card does echo-cancelation better as well as using far less interrupts than Digium hardware(a big bottleneck with busy Digium systems). I emailed Sangoma(they are located in Canada) for a quote and quickly received a phone call from them. They were very interested in getting my feedback on using their quad port T1/E1 card with Asterisk and they quoted me a discounted price of $1190 US for the card(They said retail was $1700 US [Digium quad-cards are $1495 retail but you can get them through resellers for a couple hundred less]). The Sangoma card comes with a 30-day money back guarantee and a 3 year warranty. When I received the card I noticed a couple things right away, it was a very professionally packaged item and it came with 4 T1 cables in the box as well as documentation and all of the other pretty things you expect in a retail package. The second thing I noticed is that the card was compatible with a 2U form-factor(That's right, they crammed 4 T1/E1 ports together so it can fit in a 2U case vertically) This was achieved in-part because the ports are actually on a fixed daughter card, but it did bring up the thought that they could actually cram 6 ports on one of these cards :) Next I started to sort through the documentation and files on their FTP site. I noticed something I wish Digium cards had: User-upgradable firmware on the board(I have previously had to return an early version of the T410P Digium board to get a newer one with newer firmware on it). Let the installation begin. I started by downloading and installing Asterisk as usual(zaptel, libpri, asterisk[version 1.0.6]), then I downloaded and installed Wanpipe release 2.3.2 beta6. I could now see my card and went into the wancfg utility to configure my card. Here's when it stopped being a smooth experience. I tried installing it by the asterisk instructions found on the FTP site(which I found out later were out of date and incorrect) and eventually it all worked up until the final starting step. The drivers saw the card, but said nothing was connected to them which I thought was a strange problem since you don't have to have anything connected to a Digium card for Asterisk to fully startup. So I emailed tech support and walked through some reconfiguration steps and then after a few more emails back and forth it came out that they had a problem with D4/AMI signalling on a RBS T1(which they say they will have a fix for at some undefined time in the future). After switching the wanpipe config for the first span to B8ZS/ESF with a PRI T1 I was able to run ztcfg and asterisk. I placed some test calls and all went well, at least until I tried hooking up a live RBS(Robbed-bit, 24 full channels not PRI) EM Wink T1. It turns out that the guys at Sangoma have never had a customer that used EM Wink start and accordingly they have never tested their cards with it, and of course it didn't work. So another email and call to Sangoma and they started working on a fix. Two days later they added a Wink for wink start T1s and sent me a new version of the software. I loaded it and it worked, but all audio and call detects stopped working if I tried to use more than 10 of the RBS T1 channels, so back to Sangoma for another new driver version. After a few days, and a few more driver versions, they came up with one that seemed to fix all of the problems I was having before so I did my simple stress test of picking up, hanging up and redirecting to meetme of about 52 Zap lines and all went well. Now on to the performance testing. For a performance test, I swapped out an identically configured machine that had a Digium T405P with my test machine and put it live in company inbound/outbound call center during off-hours to test(This server usually handles over 20,000 calls in/out a day with lots of recording going on across T1s, SIP phones and some IAX2 trunks). This server has two RBS T1s, one PRI T1 and one Channel Bank. I placed a test call out of the channel bank through the PRI and then started automated calls from the two RBS T1s to go into meetme conferences. The performance test ran great and it did prove
Re: [Asterisk-Users] My Sangoma Experience - Review
Great info Matt. Thanks. /Danny On Thu, 2005-04-07 at 10:20 -0400, mattf wrote: My Sangoma Experience in Asterisk:2005-04-07 snip MATT--- ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
Re: [Asterisk-Users] My Sangoma Experience - Review
Thanks for the informative review Matt. Please tell why you are using RBS T1 trunks instead of PRIs. Is it the cost or availability issue from the ILEC/CLEC or is there some other advantage. PRIs and RBS T1s are about the same price in my part of the world. Tom At 09:20 AM 4/7/2005, you wrote: My Sangoma Experience in Asterisk: 2005-04-07 Having pushed my Digium Asterisk systems to their capacity many times and figuring out the limits of the Digium hardware I decided it was time to test an Asterisk-compatible Sangoma Quad T1/E1 card(AFT-A104u) to see if they live up to their hype of being more efficient than the Digium variety(T405P). I had talked with someone from Sangoma before at Astricon, but it was rather informal, he didn't have any literature and I was rather swamped at the time as it was. Then I saw a posting on the asterisk-users list about the claims that the Sangoma card does echo-cancelation better as well as using far less interrupts than Digium hardware(a big bottleneck with busy Digium systems). I emailed Sangoma(they are located in Canada) for a quote and quickly received a phone call from them. They were very interested in getting my feedback on using their quad port T1/E1 card with Asterisk and they quoted me a discounted price of $1190 US for the card(They said retail was $1700 US [Digium quad-cards are $1495 retail but you can get them through resellers for a couple hundred less]). The Sangoma card comes with a 30-day money back guarantee and a 3 year warranty. When I received the card I noticed a couple things right away, it was a very professionally packaged item and it came with 4 T1 cables in the box as well as documentation and all of the other pretty things you expect in a retail package. The second thing I noticed is that the card was compatible with a 2U form-factor(That's right, they crammed 4 T1/E1 ports together so it can fit in a 2U case vertically) This was achieved in-part because the ports are actually on a fixed daughter card, but it did bring up the thought that they could actually cram 6 ports on one of these cards :) Next I started to sort through the documentation and files on their FTP site. I noticed something I wish Digium cards had: User-upgradable firmware on the board(I have previously had to return an early version of the T410P Digium board to get a newer one with newer firmware on it). Let the installation begin. I started by downloading and installing Asterisk as usual(zaptel, libpri, asterisk[version 1.0.6]), then I downloaded and installed Wanpipe release 2.3.2 beta6. I could now see my card and went into the wancfg utility to configure my card. Here's when it stopped being a smooth experience. I tried installing it by the asterisk instructions found on the FTP site(which I found out later were out of date and incorrect) and eventually it all worked up until the final starting step. The drivers saw the card, but said nothing was connected to them which I thought was a strange problem since you don't have to have anything connected to a Digium card for Asterisk to fully startup. So I emailed tech support and walked through some reconfiguration steps and then after a few more emails back and forth it came out that they had a problem with D4/AMI signalling on a RBS T1(which they say they will have a fix for at some undefined time in the future). After switching the wanpipe config for the first span to B8ZS/ESF with a PRI T1 I was able to run ztcfg and asterisk. I placed some test calls and all went well, at least until I tried hooking up a live RBS(Robbed-bit, 24 full channels not PRI) EM Wink T1. It turns out that the guys at Sangoma have never had a customer that used EM Wink start and accordingly they have never tested their cards with it, and of course it didn't work. So another email and call to Sangoma and they started working on a fix. Two days later they added a Wink for wink start T1s and sent me a new version of the software. I loaded it and it worked, but all audio and call detects stopped working if I tried to use more than 10 of the RBS T1 channels, so back to Sangoma for another new driver version. After a few days, and a few more driver versions, they came up with one that seemed to fix all of the problems I was having before so I did my simple stress test of picking up, hanging up and redirecting to meetme of about 52 Zap lines and all went well. Now on to the performance testing. For a performance test, I swapped out an identically configured machine that had a Digium T405P with my test machine and put it live in company inbound/outbound call center during off-hours to test(This server usually handles over 20,000 calls in/out a day with lots of recording going on across T1s, SIP phones and some IAX2 trunks). This server has two RBS T1s, one PRI T1 and one Channel Bank. I placed a test call out of the channel bank through the PRI and then started automated calls from the two RBS T1s to go into meetme conferences.
RE: [Asterisk-Users] My Sangoma Experience - Review
Several of these RBS T1s have been here for many years and before we moved to Asterisk a few pieces of phone hardware we used were not PRI-compatible. There is also the fact that we still use Channel banks which are also RBS. We have started a long process of switching to PRIs as our RBS T1 contracts expire, but that is going to take another 2 years. Pricing was not really an issue. MATT--- -Original Message- From: Tom [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2005 11:29 AM To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] My Sangoma Experience - Review Thanks for the informative review Matt. Please tell why you are using RBS T1 trunks instead of PRIs. Is it the cost or availability issue from the ILEC/CLEC or is there some other advantage. PRIs and RBS T1s are about the same price in my part of the world. Tom At 09:20 AM 4/7/2005, you wrote: My Sangoma Experience in Asterisk: 2005-04-07 Having pushed my Digium Asterisk systems to their capacity many times and figuring out the limits of the Digium hardware I decided it was time to test an Asterisk-compatible Sangoma Quad T1/E1 card(AFT-A104u) to see if they live up to their hype of being more efficient than the Digium variety(T405P). I had talked with someone from Sangoma before at Astricon, but it was rather informal, he didn't have any literature and I was rather swamped at the time as it was. Then I saw a posting on the asterisk-users list about the claims that the Sangoma card does echo-cancelation better as well as using far less interrupts than Digium hardware(a big bottleneck with busy Digium systems). I emailed Sangoma(they are located in Canada) for a quote and quickly received a phone call from them. They were very interested in getting my feedback on using their quad port T1/E1 card with Asterisk and they quoted me a discounted price of $1190 US for the card(They said retail was $1700 US [Digium quad-cards are $1495 retail but you can get them through resellers for a couple hundred less]). The Sangoma card comes with a 30-day money back guarantee and a 3 year warranty. When I received the card I noticed a couple things right away, it was a very professionally packaged item and it came with 4 T1 cables in the box as well as documentation and all of the other pretty things you expect in a retail package. The second thing I noticed is that the card was compatible with a 2U form-factor(That's right, they crammed 4 T1/E1 ports together so it can fit in a 2U case vertically) This was achieved in-part because the ports are actually on a fixed daughter card, but it did bring up the thought that they could actually cram 6 ports on one of these cards :) Next I started to sort through the documentation and files on their FTP site. I noticed something I wish Digium cards had: User-upgradable firmware on the board(I have previously had to return an early version of the T410P Digium board to get a newer one with newer firmware on it). Let the installation begin. I started by downloading and installing Asterisk as usual(zaptel, libpri, asterisk[version 1.0.6]), then I downloaded and installed Wanpipe release 2.3.2 beta6. I could now see my card and went into the wancfg utility to configure my card. Here's when it stopped being a smooth experience. I tried installing it by the asterisk instructions found on the FTP site(which I found out later were out of date and incorrect) and eventually it all worked up until the final starting step. The drivers saw the card, but said nothing was connected to them which I thought was a strange problem since you don't have to have anything connected to a Digium card for Asterisk to fully startup. So I emailed tech support and walked through some reconfiguration steps and then after a few more emails back and forth it came out that they had a problem with D4/AMI signalling on a RBS T1(which they say they will have a fix for at some undefined time in the future). After switching the wanpipe config for the first span to B8ZS/ESF with a PRI T1 I was able to run ztcfg and asterisk. I placed some test calls and all went well, at least until I tried hooking up a live RBS(Robbed-bit, 24 full channels not PRI) EM Wink T1. It turns out that the guys at Sangoma have never had a customer that used EM Wink start and accordingly they have never tested their cards with it, and of course it didn't work. So another email and call to Sangoma and they started working on a fix. Two days later they added a Wink for wink start T1s and sent me a new version of the software. I loaded it and it worked, but all audio and call detects stopped working if I tried to use more than 10 of the RBS T1 channels, so back to Sangoma for another new driver version. After a few days, and a few more driver versions, they came up with one that seemed to fix all of the problems I was having before so I did my simple stress test of picking up, hanging up and redirecting
Re: [Asterisk-Users] My Sangoma Experience - Review
Hi, Could you please include if you used the software zaptel echo canceller or the daughterboards for the te4xxp ? As that would explain the difference in cpu usage. I have no daughterboards for the te410p cards yet, nor do i own any sangoma things, so no testing here. Joachim. Joachim. Tom wrote: Thanks for the informative review Matt. Please tell why you are using RBS T1 trunks instead of PRIs. Is it the cost or availability issue from the ILEC/CLEC or is there some other advantage. PRIs and RBS T1s are about the same price in my part of the world. Tom At 09:20 AM 4/7/2005, you wrote: My Sangoma Experience in Asterisk: 2005-04-07 Having pushed my Digium Asterisk systems to their capacity many times and figuring out the limits of the Digium hardware I decided it was time to test an Asterisk-compatible Sangoma Quad T1/E1 card(AFT-A104u) to see if they live up to their hype of being more efficient than the Digium variety(T405P). I had talked with someone from Sangoma before at Astricon, but it was rather informal, he didn't have any literature and I was rather swamped at the time as it was. Then I saw a posting on the asterisk-users list about the claims that the Sangoma card does echo-cancelation better as well as using far less interrupts than Digium hardware(a big bottleneck with busy Digium systems). I emailed Sangoma(they are located in Canada) for a quote and quickly received a phone call from them. They were very interested in getting my feedback on using their quad port T1/E1 card with Asterisk and they quoted me a discounted price of $1190 US for the card(They said retail was $1700 US [Digium quad-cards are $1495 retail but you can get them through resellers for a couple hundred less]). The Sangoma card comes with a 30-day money back guarantee and a 3 year warranty. When I received the card I noticed a couple things right away, it was a very professionally packaged item and it came with 4 T1 cables in the box as well as documentation and all of the other pretty things you expect in a retail package. The second thing I noticed is that the card was compatible with a 2U form-factor(That's right, they crammed 4 T1/E1 ports together so it can fit in a 2U case vertically) This was achieved in-part because the ports are actually on a fixed daughter card, but it did bring up the thought that they could actually cram 6 ports on one of these cards :) Next I started to sort through the documentation and files on their FTP site. I noticed something I wish Digium cards had: User-upgradable firmware on the board(I have previously had to return an early version of the T410P Digium board to get a newer one with newer firmware on it). Let the installation begin. I started by downloading and installing Asterisk as usual(zaptel, libpri, asterisk[version 1.0.6]), then I downloaded and installed Wanpipe release 2.3.2 beta6. I could now see my card and went into the wancfg utility to configure my card. Here's when it stopped being a smooth experience. I tried installing it by the asterisk instructions found on the FTP site(which I found out later were out of date and incorrect) and eventually it all worked up until the final starting step. The drivers saw the card, but said nothing was connected to them which I thought was a strange problem since you don't have to have anything connected to a Digium card for Asterisk to fully startup. So I emailed tech support and walked through some reconfiguration steps and then after a few more emails back and forth it came out that they had a problem with D4/AMI signalling on a RBS T1(which they say they will have a fix for at some undefined time in the future). After switching the wanpipe config for the first span to B8ZS/ESF with a PRI T1 I was able to run ztcfg and asterisk. I placed some test calls and all went well, at least until I tried hooking up a live RBS(Robbed-bit, 24 full channels not PRI) EM Wink T1. It turns out that the guys at Sangoma have never had a customer that used EM Wink start and accordingly they have never tested their cards with it, and of course it didn't work. So another email and call to Sangoma and they started working on a fix. Two days later they added a Wink for wink start T1s and sent me a new version of the software. I loaded it and it worked, but all audio and call detects stopped working if I tried to use more than 10 of the RBS T1 channels, so back to Sangoma for another new driver version. After a few days, and a few more driver versions, they came up with one that seemed to fix all of the problems I was having before so I did my simple stress test of picking up, hanging up and redirecting to meetme of about 52 Zap lines and all went well. Now on to the performance testing. For a performance test, I swapped out an identically configured machine that had a Digium T405P with my test machine and put it live in company inbound/outbound call center during off-hours to test(This server usually handles over 20,000 calls
RE: [Asterisk-Users] My Sangoma Experience - Review
Hello, This would be software since I still don't see the Digium echo-cancellers anywhere for sale and don't know how to get one. If Digium wants to send me one I would gladly test it. The overall machine load is also affected by the way interrupts are used and the fact that Sangoma uses significantly less than a Digium card uses. MATT--- Hi, Could you please include if you used the software zaptel echo canceller or the daughterboards for the te4xxp ? As that would explain the difference in cpu usage. I have no daughterboards for the te410p cards yet, nor do i own any sangoma things, so no testing here. Joachim. Joachim. Tom wrote: Thanks for the informative review Matt. Please tell why you are using RBS T1 trunks instead of PRIs. Is it the cost or availability issue from the ILEC/CLEC or is there some other advantage. PRIs and RBS T1s are about the same price in my part of the world. Tom -Original Message- From: Zoa [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2005 12:54 PM To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] My Sangoma Experience - Review ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users ___ Asterisk-Users mailing list Asterisk-Users@lists.digium.com http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
