The rapid growth of the telephony industry — especially VoIP — has necessitated concurrent advances in supporting technologies, so that hardware developers are able to keep up with the growing demands of carriers and service providers and their local and regional constituencies.

 

To meet this growing global demand, Sangoma Technologies Corporation, which develops connectivity hardware and software products for VoIP, TDM, and other voice and data infrastructures, is now shipping its complete line of enhanced PCI Express (PCIe) cards.

 

“There is a significant trend as the computer industry migrates towards PCI Express bus compatibility, especially at the high end,” says Sangoma (News - Alert) Technologies President and CEO David Mandelstam.  “In particular the A108 card, which at 240 call capacity is the highest density PC voice card existing today, is well suited to support the new high performance PCIe servers used in large telephony applications.”

 

PCI Express is a new standard computer bus using existing PCI programming theory, but bases it on new and faster physical serial layer protocols. The expectation is that PCIe will quickly replace standard PCI in high-end servers and workstations — like those required to support telephony.

 

Making use of this new bus architecture, Sangoma’s Octal port A108, Quad port A104, and dual port A102 T1/E1 cards, as well as its A200 analog voice system, are all now available in PCIe format — which is based on the company’s Advanced Flexible Telecommunications (AFT) card family.

 

Because it understands the need to maximize on previous investments and recognizes the value of supporting legacy equipment, Sangoma will continue to produce standard PCI versions of the four new PCIe cards.  Like the older versions, PCIe cards support field upgradeable firmware to shorten upgrade time and quickly take advantage of enhancements to hardware and software as they become available.  The PCIe versions also offer optional carrier-grade echo cancellation.

 

“The beauty is that the change to PCIe is completely transparent to the user. All Sangoma’s drivers, utilities, and APIs continue to work exactly the same way for PCIe as for the older PCI standard busses,” added Mandelstam.