Ok, before all of you jump at my throat for not posting for a long time – I’m sorry. I can’t believe the last time I posted was around June, much has changed since then. So, let’s start with some updates… well, there are no big news updates. Since I left Humbug, I’ve been doing my best to keep busy with GreenfieldTech projects. We’ve successfully completed 10 different custom development projects since June and we’ve started a brand new services branch at GreenfieldTech – the VoIP Security Audits branch – but that’s a different post altogether.

So, I spoke at this years’ Astricon, which took place in Atlanta, Georgia!. This is my first time to the southern parts of the USA and might I add, Southern Hospitality is something you need to experience (I’ll write about that later). Much had changed at Digium in the past 2 years. Many of the long time project members had left to new grounds, Asterisk-SCF is now officially no longer in active development, in other words – this years’ Astricon was a fresh breeze of wind, specifically with new people at the driver seat and new ideas springing about.

So, let’s talk PRI cards. Once every often a company approaches me to evaluate their products. I do my best to be as impartial as I can – after all, Digium products are my favorite. However, I’m always happy to see a product that can compete nicely with Digium, simply because I believe it will make Digium products better and stronger. So, a couple of months ago, Allo.com approached me to evaluate their PRI card. I agreed, and they’ve sent me their PCI-e version of a quad span E1/T1 card.

Allo.Com PRI Card

So, let’s start with what I didn’t like about the card. People, it’s 2012, technology had progressed a great deal since the old Zaptel days, not to talk about the old Xilinx Spartan chips – comm’on, even the crappy Chinese boards don’t use that anymore – move on. Ok, let’s put aside the issue of the actual chips being used on the board – can someone PLEASE explain to me why I need to patch my DAHDI modules to support these cards? How shall I put it, patching DAHDI/ZAPTEL is so 2004. Make your card fully compatible with DAHDI, no patching, stream line the card with the DAHDI stock kernel module – OpenVOX did it, Yeastar did it (do an extent) – you want me to use your hardware, make it easy to install and simple to update and maintain.

OK, regardless of my somewhat reluctant feelings regarding drivers compatibility, I had the unit installed in a test gateway. It performed as I expected from a low-cost compatible. It held up nicely with normal traffic, but when I tried pushing 30 call initiations per second on the card, it heated up slightly and CPU spikes could be observed here and there. Now, in an office scenario – sure this card will do nicely – in a service provider scenario – I’ll think twice. Now, in the past I’ve received similar performance from other clone cards, so my estimate is that there is a group of engineers passing from one company to another, coming in with the know-how for a single design and they wrap that into a card.

Final word regarding the Allo.com card – not my favorite, but definitely a possibility for office environments. I have no idea how their other equipment holds up, but I hope that it holds as well, so that the office/smb market has a new option to choose from.

I will post my Astricon update later on.