Talking with Jim Becker, AMTELCO

By: Richard “Zippy” Grigonis

AMTELCO (www.amtelco.com), founded way back in 1976, has a vigorous business involving both call center and telephony innovations. They formed their XDS CTI (News - Alert) Boards Division (www.xds.amtelco.com) in Madison, Wisconsin in 1980, which now designs, manufactures, and markets telephony interface boards, conferencing boards, multi-chassis interconnection boards, BRI boards, and analog port boards in various formats (MVIP, SCSA, H.100 PCI, and H.110 CompactPCI (News - Alert)).

AMTELCO XDS also modifies these boards for special applications. XDS technology can be found in many solutions for central offices, call centers, wireless switching platforms, and conferencing platforms.

AMTELCO’s success resulted in no small part from the efforts of Jim Becker, Vice President of Sales and Marketing and Director of the XDS division, who joined the company in 1985. Becker, working with other skilled XDS colleagues such as Paul Henning and Bill Curtin, cleverly steered clear of the crowded world of voice board makers and instead skillfully led the company through the development of telephone interfaces and switching that weren’t available from other vendors: its two and four-wire E&M tie line boards, then to its PC switching resources, multi-chassis interconnection, BRI ISDN boards specifically for central offices, mammoth conferencing boards and then on to e-business software.

AMTELCO XDS has now entered the world of open source telephony by announcing Asterisk (News - Alert) support for their AMTELCO XDS Boards. AMTELCO provides developers with channel drivers that enable developers to call upon AMTELCO’s high density and highly reliable analog and digital telephony boards in their Asterisk-based applications. AMTELCO software driver packages are distributed free of charge to XDS customers, with open source code for the driver and all supporting applications.

RG: What are the boards AMTELCO has adapted to open source telephony?

JB: AMTELCO XDS offers the H.100 PCI 4 and 8-span E1/T1 boards. The 4-span board supports 128 ports of conferencing, 128 full duplex voice record/playback channels, 128 ports of call analysis and two analog inputs for music-on-hold. The 8-span supports 256 full duplex voice record/playback channels, 256 ports of call analysis, and two analog inputs for music-on-hold. We also offer the H.100 8-Port E&M for interfacing to military and police radio applications, the 12 and 24 Port Loop Start and the 24-port Station Port boards. The E1/T1 along with the E&M and Loop Start boards are being used by several of our developers in open source applications.

RG: Will AMTELCO ever produce an open source-only product?

JB: We rely on input from our developers to help map out our product development. AMTELCO XDS does work with developers to provide custom application boards. Until now we have not had a request from them to produce a product solely for open source, but we are in preliminary discussions with one major developer to create such a product for a future project. At the present time our developers really like our open source solution. The AMTELCO XDS open source solution provides ease of implementation, excellent reliability and high density — all of which seem to be seem to be important to our developers.

RG: Do you expect open source to be big business? How do you see its future?

JB: Yes, we have seen a definite upswing in open source developments. There is a movement in the marketplace because of the versatility and low entry costs associated with open source. However, popular as it is, not all applications involve Asterisk. Such is the viability and popularity of open source that we have had requests from our developers for other open source platforms. As its name implies, open source technology is subject to diversification and evolution by its ever-growing community. That’s what makes it so dynamic and interesting.

RG: AMTELCO seems to be pretty good as spanning both TDM and IP worlds.

JB: Funny you should say that. We just introduced our new XDS VoIP board, an aggressively-priced H.100 and T1/E1 TDM-to-VoIP gateway. The XDS H.100 PCI VoIP board includes two 1-gigabit Ethernet ports, and four T1/E1 ports with PRI, ISDN 30, and Q.SIG protocols available. The board presently supports G.711, G.723, G.729A, G.729B, G.729A/B (News - Alert) and G.726. We like to build products that work in today’s hybrid network. IT

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