Asterisk Featured Article

Digium has released its first hardware-based voice compression card, designed for use with voice applications based on the open source Asterisk (News - Alert) telephony platform.

 

In addition to providing hardware-based voice compression, the TCE400B PCI Express card provides decompression (codec) capabilities in an effort to shift transcoding from software to hardware enviroments.

 

“The TCE400B will be of interest to companies using Asterisk to build feature servers, gateways or custom systems and wanting to conserve CPU cycles,” said Bill Miller (News - Alert), Digium’s vice president of product management.

 

The use of TCE400B – in place of a traditional software-only solution – is expected to place fewer demands on servers, and free up Asterisk to more efficiently process calls and provide functionality for phone systems such as call recording, conference calling and interactive voice response (IVR).

 

“The card’s ability to work with compressed audio in multiple formats also supports its use in complex telephony environments,” said Miller. “Overall, the TCE400B will help bring Asterisk into more enterprise telephony environments.”

 

Asterisk is the most widely used open source telephony engine and tool kit, according to Miller.

As Asterisk continues to work to empower developers and systems integrators to create Voice over IP (VoIP) communication solutions that match the specific needs of a business – by offering flexibility to access and alter the software code –  the open source solutions outfit has steadily grown into most widely used open source telephony engine and tool kit.

 

While many businesses use Asterisk as a PBX (News - Alert) to manage phone calls, it has expanded in other areas and is often used as a gateway between IP and PSTN networks, a telephony feature server and as the basis for call center applications, according the Huntsville, Ala.-based outfit.

In addition to its support for G.729a transcoding, the TCE400B gives Asterisk the ability to convert G.723.1 compressed audio into other formats, a capability not otherwise possible with Asterisk or software-only solutions.

 

The card’s capabilities allow transcoding between simple, G.711 u-law and a-law, and complex, G.729a 8.0 kbit/s and G.723.1 5.3/6.3 kbit/s, codecs. When running in G.729a mode, the TCE400B can support 120 simultaneous transformations; in a mixed G.729a and G.723.1 mode, it supports 92 simultaneous transformations.