Digium Introduces New Telephony Interface Card for ISDN-BRI and Analog Connectivity at First Digium|Asterisk World London

DIGIUM|ASTERISK WORLD AT UC EXPO, LONDON, March 10, 2010 — Today, at the first Digium|Asterisk World conference held in London, Digium® unveiled its new HX8 Series of telephony interface cards for BRI and analog connectivity. ISDN-BRI is the predominant service used by small to medium-sized businesses in Europe, Australia and South Africa to connect to public telephone networks. Digium created the new cards in response to a strong increase in global adoption of Asterisk, the most widely used open source telephony engine.

Malcolm Davenport, Digium's senior product manager, commented: "Public and private sector organizations in Europe in particular have embraced open source to save money, customize their communication solutions and avoid vendor lock-in. We've seen a strong increase in Asterisk use in Europe in the past few years, and our partners have been asking for a Digium solution with the flexibility to support both BRI and analog connections. We're pleased to provide the HX8 Series, which we believe is superior to other offerings in terms of performance, quality and features."

HX8 Series Telephony Interface Cards

The HX8 Series cards support 1-8 analog ports, 4-8 BRI ports, or a hybrid of the two with 4 BRI and 1-4 analog FXS or FXO ports. Each ISDN-BRI port can carry two calls, giving the cards a maximum capacity of 16 concurrent calls. The ability to mix FXS, FXO and BRI on the same card is unique in the Asterisk market. The cards are also the first in the Asterisk market to operate in a jumperless mode. NT and TE modes as well as line termination resistance can be set entirely in software. Unlike other products, the HX8 Series' complete software and application stack is created by one company, Digium, reducing the possibility of support problems. The Digium boards use industry standard RJ-11 connectors for analog and RJ-11 to RJ-45 adapters for BRI. The HX8 cards make it possible to include both BRI and analog connections in low profile servers requiring just 1U of space. Board-level firmware upgrades for the HX8 Series can be easily downloaded and installed in the field. The HX8 series cards all include support for Digium's VPMADT032 128ms G.168-compliant hardware echo cancellation module. Hardware echo cancellation offloads the processor-intensive echo cancellation process from the host PC. The HX8 Series cards use Digium's VoiceBusTM technology, a patent-pending advance that increases performance and compatibility an using an industry standard bus-mastering PCI interface.

Pricing and Availability

The HX8 Series will be available on March 31, 2010, from Digium and partners in Europe, Africa and Australia. The HA8 PCI base board is priced at $299US, the HB8 PCI-Express base board is $345US and the B400M quad-port BRI module is $355US. For additional information, see Diguim's presentation on the HX8 Series.