Asterisk hardware – particularly asterisk cards – have been around and options just keep on growing. Like my previous post here, we’ll take a look at CTO Tom Keating of TMC Labs had to say about them:
Let’s see — you have Digium cards, Aculab cards, Dialogic cards, PIKA cards, Rhino, and Sangoma cards that all work on Asterisk-based systems. (You also have ZAPMICRO and OpenVox which are Digium-cloned cards.)
Some cards work more seamlessly and have better driver support than others. For instance, I’ve heard it is difficult to get Dialogic channel drivers to work on Asterisk. I recall hearing that the Dialogic driver was licensed such that it could only be used with Asterisk Business Edition. In any event, with so much hardware competition for the Asterisk platform, how does this affect Digium, the corporation behind the open source Asterisk movement? A lot of their revenue comes from their hardware business, so with so many choices will this leave Digium “high and dry”?
Tom Keating goes further:
As SmithonVoIP points out, Sangoma’s stock has been going like gangbusters when he points out, “Sangoma posted their Q3 earnings today, which showed a 24% increase in revenues over the previous quarter of this year, a 68% year over year increase in sales revenues, a 69% year over year increase in net income, and a 56% year over year increase in Net earnings.” Relatedly, Rich Tehrani and I were discussing Sangoma’s phenomenal stock growth a few weeks ago and both of us planned on writing about it. I believe Rich has an article planned for Internet Telephony Magazine highlighting Sangoma. Obviously, Sangoma has been riding the “hockey stick curve” of Asterisk, which has been dramatically boosting Sangoma’s revenue. (they sell other hardware as well)
Then you have OpenVox, a company based in China offering “Digium-cloned” hardware. They use the same hardware reference design that Digium uses. In fact, they look nearly identical. While they also suffer from the same hardware interrupt issues as Digium hardware, they’re 20% cheaper – or more. OpenVox was probably the first Digium clone and I believe is the largest. Similarly, another Chinese-based company, ZAPMICRO is also offering Digium-cloned hardware.
Adding to Tom’s review on alternative asterisk hardware, Zapmicro is sold at nearly 40% off in PBXEQ. If this is the case and you would prefer working with Digium-similar asterisk cards, better go for Zapmicro then. Meanwhile, Sangoma is highly favored in the article and if you have the budget for it, it would be a good choice for your asterisk implementation.
You may read Tom’s full article on Asterisk hardware options here, and his review on Sangoma VS Digium.
October 4, 2007 at 4:21 pm
I think this post (and to be honest, the name of this blog in general) is a bit disingenuous. First and foremost, you call this blog VoiPsupply (which happens to be the name of a well-known VoIP hardware supplier) while using posts to steer people away from them and towards your own website. At the same time, to quote old posts from Tom Keating’s blog is also dodgy at best.
In case you or your readers aren’t aware, Digium has invested lots of time and effort to re-architect their line of hardware cards to eliminate the IRQ and PCI bus errors that some customers experienced in the past. (Digium openly admits that they’ve made some bad hardware design decisions in the past, and their VoiceBus architecture was created to address that.) To quote Tom’s old blog posting as if they were an accurate representation of the current state of the card market obviously isn’t telling the whole story.
To me, this whole blog smells of a smear campaign… something along the lines of “let’s malign VoIP Supply and Digium so that people will buy other manufacturer’s cards from us”.
-Jared Smith
October 5, 2007 at 12:43 am
Well, for one, there is no VoIPsupply nor a Digium bashing campaign here. I only research what I can find over the internet and simply post it here, and giving due credit to sources. Regarding Tom’s blog, it dates June 2007, which is around 4 months ago. If Digium has indeed addressed the admitted bad hardware at this time, then good for them and their customers. With the huge links to VoIPsupply’s and Digium’s official websites, I don’t think this blog will have an effect at all. It simply informs the public about digium alternatives.