Telephony PC hardware support

2009-08-29 13:05:14

Together with the technicians from the Neophone company the Smartswitch + PRI PCI card from Digium testing has been done.

At the current point of time we provide Smartswitch based on the FreeBSD OS, therefore we used the last stable zaptel port for the FreeBSD to add support for this telephony card.

As a result, system worked as a SIP<->PRI gateway. The only bad thing was that driver for the card from the zaptel port for FreeBSD works very unstable. Sporadically it leads to kernel panic.

As Digium representatives state, they will produce drivers for telephony cards only for Linux platform. Porting to other OS is done by enthusiasts. Thus, these ports are not always stable. It appears, that this practice is common among all the other vendors of the telephony PC cards.

Thus we decided:

• To begin porting of the system to Linux. However this doesn't mean that we are going to drop support for FreeBSD. Both operating systems have pros and cons. Thus we will produce distributions for both OS simultaneously. The exact OS for installation will be chosen basing on the customer's needs. Also, situation with the FreeBSD port might change soon (hopefully);
• To add support for telephony PC cards into our system.

We are very grateful to Neophone company for equipment and support in setup,