On 07/21/2010 11:25 PM, Kristian Kielhofner wrote:
On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 11:01 AM, Steve Underwood<steveu@coppice.org> wrote:
I suppose they might, but I can't see any commercial incentive for them to do so. Sangoma now has the only card that does a decent number of channels, so they face no competition for larger users. For smaller users (i.e. potential Digium TC400B card buyers) transcoding on the main CPU makes more sense these days. The latest 8 core Xeons should be good for over a thousand channels of G.729A transcoding.
Steve
We should also consider the economics here...
The flagship of the 7500 series (the X7560) is selling for upwards of $4000 in bulk (obviously this will go down over time). The 480 channel Sangoma card is around $2000. The 480 channel Sangoma card includes licenses and support for G.711, G.722, G.722.1, G.726, G.729AB, GSM-FR, GSM-EFR, AMR, AMR-WB, and iLBC.
Don't they have G.723.1 support? If not, that's a sad omission. Quite a few people need that, and only the Digium card has been able to offer it in a properly licenced manner.
At $10/channel for a FreeSWITCH software license (assuming they don't offer bulk pricing) you'd pay around $14,000 for 1000 channels of G729 on that CPU (no other codecs). With Sangoma you'd pay $4,000 and get support for AMR and AMR-WB, which FreeSWITCH doesn't even offer software support for (that I know of).
There is no practical way to licence the patents for GSM-EFR, AMR -NB or AMR-WB for small to medium volume use. Sangoma get their licencing through the silicon they use. Same for Digium with their G.729 + G.723.1 card licencing. Licencing through the silicon also gets G.729 patent licencing at much lower prices than the way Digium, Freeswitch and Howler need to licence the same patents for their purely software products. Its all rather messy, really. Steve