VoIP solutions provider Positron Telecom has released a new white paper detailing the advantages the company’s PBX PCI adapter products have over those of other leading Asterisk (News - Alert)-based telephony board makers.

Positron Telecom’s PBX PCI adapters come pre-integrated with Asterisk and combine PBX, gateway, echo canceller and Ethernet on a single telephony board. For this reason the company’s VoIP solutions are many times simpler and faster to install – plus, with fewer points of failure, they are more reliable than competing solutions.

As the white paper points out, some of the other leading telephony board makers have installed “wimpy” echo canceller software on their boards which isn’t always adequate for handling extreme echo. The software-based solutions that other vendors provide, it states, simply aren’t “robust” enough – “and many DSP based solutions are not well architected or lack processing power,” resulting in performance issues that affect voice quality.

Positron’s VoIP solutions include what is called an ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) to handle echo. Although it is more expensive, compared to software or a DSP, it’s far better at handling the echo “long tail.”  The ASIC is installed in-line – it doesn’t require any code – all the installer has to do is just turn it on and it takes care of the echo. And because it is a dedicated chip, it is a lot faster than a DSP.

Because Positron’s PBX PCI (News - Alert) Adapters work as standalone solutions -- with all voice processing handled on the board itself -- that means there is no “codec penalty” on the host machine. In other words, the host is relieved of having to allocate CPU for voice processing. With the other leading Asterisk-based VoIP solutions, the trans-coding which occurs on the host PC not only reduces overall processing power, it also decreases voice quality by poorly processing the packets.

Competing solutions are also more prone to “hardware interrupts.” As the white paper explains, the ZAP (News - Alert) driver requires 1 millisecond interrupts to function, which could lead to over 1,000 interrupts per second on a multi-board installation. This amount of processing heavily affects the host PC, again, resulting in poor performance.

The white paper also calls out the shortcomings of competing solutions in terms of multi-vendor or multi-board interworking. Due to driver limitations and proprietary implementations, it is difficult or impossible to mix and match installations with competing solutions. Whereas with Positron’s VoIP solutions, board-to-board communication is free to occur using SIP; load balancing is easily achieved using SIP; any mixture of boards can be used in the host PC, as the actual interface is transparent to the system.

Positron’s VoIP solutions also have an advantage in that they enable faster time to market. As mentioned, Positron’s solutions do not require any additional drivers – meaning they are faster and simpler to install and configure. This is different from competing solutions, which require application vendors to run large scale testing to ensure that custom API changes did not affect application functionality.

 

Competing solutions also fall short in terms of TDM clustering: Due to the architecture being “driver dependant,” a distributed architecture is not possible.

 

Finally, most competing solutions aren’t designed work in a virtualized computing environment. Due to the requirement of a driver/API implementation, virtualization support is not possible.

To learn more about Positron Telecom’s VoIP solutions click here. To download a free copy of the white paper, click here.