On Thu, 1 Mar 2007, Dave Sherman wrote:
> I'll have to look into those -- any idea how they compare with Digium, 
> in "bang for the buck"?

Everyone I know who's used the cards love them; unfortunately, that's 
about the extent of my experience.  :(

> If Eric is already spending $300/month or more on 8 analog lines, a BRI 
> line could be very cost-effective, making this is a good suggestion.

Actually, in that case, a PRI would be the route to go.. BRI's are 
old-fashioned ISDN with 2 channels plus signalling; PRI's can have up to 
23 channels (plus one signalling channel.)

> We tried it (using the latest version of asterisk compiled from source), 
> but to be honest, hit a wall when Asterisk would core dump every time a 
> fax came in. Since we were under a bit of time pressure (to put it 
> mildly), we went the "easy route" and just got a couple of analog lines 
> from Qwest.

Nothing wrong with that!  :)

> This is something we definitely want to investigate in the near future, 
> though, since it would save us a bit of cash, and add some nice 
> functionality to the system. Every DID can become an instant "fax 
> machine", effectively giving each office user their own personal fax.

Exactly - and fax via e-mail is much nicer than fax via paper!

> Good to know. They must keep a lot of processing in the card itself, 
> rather than sending it to the CPU, right? Otherwise I can't see how this 
> would work.

Correct - Digium gives you the prices they do by doing a lot of the 
processing on the host CPU; Sangoma does the processing on the card (and 
costs more), but also lets you do more on one box.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
| nate carlson | natecars at natecarlson.com | http://www.natecarlson.com |
|       depriving some poor village of its idiot since 1981            |
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