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Aculab’s Prosody boards are offered to Asterisk developers and integrators who are looking for proven, reliable hardware for connection to legacy TDM-based networks, and for the offloading of certain CPU intensive tasks. The boards are tested under Digium’s interoperability certification programme for compatibility with Asterisk Business Edition. As a result, customers can rely on the combination of proven Asterisk software and Aculab hardware to work together to provide feature rich PBX or VoIP systems.
As an open source software PBX product for the Linux operating system, Asterisk supports the creation of a variety of IP-based communications applications such as voicemail, IVR, music on hold, least cost routing, call centres and VoIP switches. Asterisk Business Edition is the feature frozen, tested and warranted, professional grade version of Asterisk, which offers a cost-effective approach to voice and data transport over IP architectures.
To extend Asterisk into TDM infrastructures, Aculab provides digital network access options that have become an industry benchmark for long term reliability in business critical applications. Additionally, Aculab hardware offers an alternative for handling of complex, processor intensive tasks, such as echo cancellation, which can impact the channel count capability of a system running Asterisk software.
Legacy TDM network connection
There are many reasons for choosing Aculab products to work with Asterisk and Business Edition. These include reliability, scalability, regulatory approvals and worldwide protocol support, particularly for SS7.
Asterisk is global and is used in more than 200 countries around the world, however, for operation into legacy TDM infrastructures, telephony hardware interfaces and media resources are needed. Aculab’s Prosody boards offer several hardware options, with essential host independent telecoms and safety approvals, enabling rapid deployment in virtually any country you wish to deploy your Asterisk solution. Choosing hardware from Aculab as the gateway element to TDM-based networks resolves your connectivity issues – simply and reliably.
Protocol support
Aculab is the recognised industry leader in primary rate (T1/E1) signalling protocols and offers an extensive, worldwide range of protocols, including many national and international variants of CAS, ISDN and SS7. Aculab’s protocol firmware is readily available, via a cost free licence, for download from its website. Moreover, you can mix any of the supported protocols on one board, making it possible to have T1 and E1, SS7 and ISDN connectivity using a single board solution. The accessibility of protocols from Aculab, including SS7 ISUP, ensures the cost-effectiveness of your Asterisk solution can be maintained.
Easing the burden on Asterisk
Aculab’s hardware offers an expansive range of features that readily scale to high density. By using such higher density products with more features, together with Asterisk Business Edition, a wider market reach for Asterisk-based solutions is possible.
Aculab boards have a large amount of on-board processing power, which can further complement Asterisk where inherently everything is done on the host chassis. Prosody boards offload DTMF detection and call bridging from the host when used with Asterisk. Additionally, particularly for IVR functionality and some CAS protocols, the hardware media processing capabilities offload tone detection and tone generation from the host CPU.
Prosody boards also provide a further rich set of media capabilities through their on-board DSPs, such as configurable echo cancellation, live speaker detection, and fax, which can be enabled under Asterisk. This means more host processing headroom for the Asterisk software to run, which means solutions can be scaled further than previously feasible. Easing the burden on Asterisk platforms in this way presents a compelling proposition for Asterisk users.
There are many additional media processing resource functions available with Prosody, such as transcoding, which are not currently enabled for use with Asterisk. Professional support services, including consultancy on the integration of additional functions, are available from Aculab. Please contact sales@aculab.com
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