We recently got a TE220 with onboard Hardware Echo Cancellation from Voipsupply.com for the price gouging cost of $1,150.
I was all excited since we have had lots of reports of echo on our lines and I was glad to get the district to pay for the add on card for it. We needed to get the PCI-E aspect of the card, but they didn’t have to spring for the Echo Canceller. So I rebuilt my server onto a new machine and got everything lined out. I couldn’t find a straight answer on what I needed to have in zapata.conf in terms of the echo options. Right now I have them off.
I was getting errors in dmesg about a missing firmware for the card, but I let that go at the time because I figured that the trixbox install that I have has the zaptel drivers on it from Digium. Wrong.
So people started reporting that there wasn’t much difference between this card and the other one that we had. I almost never have echo on my phone, so I couldn’t tell what was going on. I do have echo though whenever I call home, so today I was able to do that when P was home and I heard echo. I started trying to track down how to tell if the hardware echo canceller was working or not. That is when I found something stating that the firmware missing was part of that. Apparently Trixbox doesn’t have the firmware on it and of course Digium says it is Trixbox’s fault and that you should compile the zaptel modules from source by hand. You know I put Trixbox on the machine because I didn’t want to do that kind of crap. I also think it is stupid that the Digium card came with no documentation or anything. Also to get to some of the documents about the card, I had to register with Digium and I then get a call from a Digium rep asking me what hardware I was interested in buying from them. WTF?
So I found the firmware files in their CVS and just downloaded them specifically. You can find them linked at the top. They are firmware so they shouldn’t need compiled. I dropped them in /lib/firmware and reset asterisk and zaptel. Now I wait to see what is going on with the echo over the next few days.
I would also like to mention that I am not thrilled with the Trixbox forums and the assistance that they are providing to people. I realize that I don’t have the Pro version or Premium support, but I have yet to ask a question over there that has gotten a straight answer from anyone there.
Asterisk/Trixbox really seems to be close to being a prime time setup, but I don’t feel that the people involved in it really are.
Yes, I completely agree with you on the Trixbox support forums. I wouldn’t say thats an issue with Fonality (the folks who bought AAH and turned it into TxBx), but rather with the fact that since the switch all the AAH folks have moved elsewhere or become silent. The forums are full of people asking questions and no answers. Pretty soon that gets people turned off about the forums altogether. Also, the new website is a bit of a hassle to use.
I think that just like FC/RHEL, Fonality is concentrating on the Pro version. Hard to blame them since thats what makes $.
And as price-gouging as the VoIPSupply cost is, note that old school PBX hardware literally costs an arm and a leg. And this one PCI card really gets the job done. Had mine for a while now, love it.
You sir are wrong it is a _PCI-E_ Card! Not some lowly PCI card. Do no insult my phone switch in such manner. Also if you are going to bitch at me to put Gravitar on my journal how about your fix yours?
I fully agree with everyone on the Trixbox support. It’s bad enough they don’t have any technical support on the forums, but I’m beginning to think the whole system is run by a bunch of kids. When you do a ‘yum install kernel-devel’ and it’s not in the repository.. you have a problem. The first thing I do is turn off yum updates because they can’t seem to keep the repositories strait.. and in a production environment.. it’s just not acceptable. The fact that Trixbox is nothing more than other peoples work compiled into a single source is beginning to make me look into just using CentOS 5 and rpmforge.net or atrpms.net to install Asterisk and the other components such as FreePBX, etc.