Steve,

You definitely have a better grasp on this topic than me.  But I think it's a tough sell on the host based processing ... when you look at products like what audio codes can do on a card (3 DS-3's worth of transcoding) ... but I have had a couple of soft switch vendors claim though that they could do 2,000 calls per host (but I seriously doubt it).

I agree that producing a card that does 120 channels is pretty worthless ... but having something that could do say a 1000 would be very helpful.

G723 is a pretty big deal internationally ... I'm even seeing crazy requests like AMR from folks trying to originate VoIP off of mobile devices in Europe.

But I agree just being able to g729 --> ulaw or ulaw --> g729 would be a great first step (host based or otherwise).  

SDR