Digium today took advantage of the excitement of the first Digium (News - Alert)/Asterisk World conference to unveil its new HX8 Series of telephony interface cards for BRI and analog connectivity.

 

ISDN-BRI is known as the predominant service used by small to medium-sized businesses in Europe, Australia and South Africa to connect to public telephone networks. The new cards have been created by Digium as their response to a strong increase in the global adoption of Asterisk (News - Alert), the most widely used open source telephony engine.

Malcolm Davenport, Digium’s senior product manager, commented in a statement: “Public and private sector organizations in Europe in particular have embraced open source to save money, customize their communication solutions and avoid vendor lock-in.

We’ve seen a strong increase in Asterisk use in Europe in the past few years, and our partners have been asking for a Digium solution with the flexibility to support both BRI and analog connections. We’re pleased to provide the HX8 Series, which we believe is superior to other offerings in terms of performance, quality and features,” added Daveport.

The HX8 Series Telephony Interface Cards support 1-8 analog ports, 4-8 BRI ports or a hybrid of the two with 4 BRI and 1-4 analog FXS or FXO ports. Each port can carry two calls and provides a maximum capacity of 16 concurrent calls. The ability to mix FXS, FXO and BRI on the same card is a unique Asterisk feature.

A first in the Asterisk market, these cards operate in a jumperless mode. NT and TE modes, in addition to line termination resistance, can be set entirely in software. The HX8 Series’ complete software and application stack is created by Digium, reducing the risk of support problems.

The Digium boards use RJ-11 connectors for analog and RJ-11 to RJ-45 adapters for BRI. The HX8 cards make it possible to include both BRI and analog connection sin low profile services that require just 1U of space. Users will enjoy easily downloaded and installed board-level firmware upgrades for the HX8 Series.

The Digium cards include support for the company’s VPMADT032 128ms G.168-compliant hardware echo cancellation module. Hardware echo cancellation offloads the processor-intensive echo cancellation process from the host PC. In addition, the cards use Digium’s VoiceBus technology to increase performance and compatibility.

In other Digium news, the company announced in December the schedule for speeches in their presentation theater within Digium|Asterisk World 2010, as part of ITEXPO (News - Alert) East in January. Last month the company announced new features and functionality for Switchvox SMB, an IP PBX (News - Alert) designed for small- to mid-sized businesses (SMBs).