Digium FXO on Ebay

Does anyone have experience of the low cost FXO cards available on Ebay that are claimed to be substitutes for the genuine Digium article. Would be interested to know how well they perform.

Badly, you get what you pay for and you have to look at your own ethics.

Let’s be specific about this. The xp100 are garbage, not supported. They were always a terrible design.

The older Tigerjet cards are based on the TDM400 reference design that is in the public domain.

Any of the newer stuff, if a cloned Digium product would violate intellectual property laws.

Also keep in mind that clean sheet designs like Openvox that require using the vendors DAHDI driver files are not the product Dicko is referring to.

You have to consider the time factor also. If you buy a Sangoma or Openvox card the drivers are compiled and included with the distro. Anything else and you are going to have to rebuild DAHDI from source with the vendor libraries.

I was looking for second user Digium cards when I came across cards that claim to be based on TDM400 for about 85 bucks. I am not into buying knock offs, just wondered how well they might work, I am skeptical and think it might be a case of you get what you pay for.

Many vendors sell on ebay “Same as Digium” hardware (some “Big Names” gardware included") these are what you will find to be badly made with low quality components and no support. In a successful deployment over months and years then saving a buck on hardware will not likely benifit you in the long run. YMMV, mine did.

As Scott states though unless you tie into a Distro that does third party work for you, compiling raw Dahdi from Digium will only support Digium accepted hardware (no clones, Openvox or Sangoma original work etc.), so unless you use a distro that has so precompiled the non Digium included hardware drivers you will need to do that yourself.

Just for clarity.

The TDM400 is the original Tigerjet reference design and is over 10 years old. It predates Asterisk 1.0

It works, but not known for high quality hybrids, the interrupt design is less than optimal and it is not a modern design power factor wise.

To clarify the software.

All DAHDI is going to support the Digium cards. Those drivers along with some Xorcom stuff is included with DAHDI distribution. Make sure to review the latest DAHDI_Linux docs for a complete list of supported hardware. Digium made a Tigerjet card with four ports (and a few others also). So those clone cards are supported with the default DAHDI drivers.

These are the drivers included with every distro.

The FreePBX distro also includes the Sangoma Wanpip drivers to support Sangoma hardware.

Perhaps

http://blogs.digium.com/2011/07/29/straight-from-the-source-avoiding-clones/

will help you decide.

Please rememeber that without Digium there would be no Asterisk and without Asterisk there would be no FreePBX and if there where no FreePBX this converstation would not exist. Note that the second comment is from a noted Chinese manufacturer’s agent that still sells cloned TDM410 stated hardware.

I would only ever buy Sangoma and all we recommend and have thousands of them in place. the FreePBX Distro has full support for their cards and only require you to run the wizard script of setup-sangoma from the command line and it will walk you through with a few questions and setup the whole card for you.

And FWIW, when it comes to TDM/PSTN connectivity, I only use Digium, Sangoma, Xorcom, RAD, Audiocodes and Redfone hardware all work as advertised, all are Digium/Asterisk recognized all have great support and each has it’s specific niche in how you design your network, for “real” HA either Redfone or Xorcom can’t be beat, for scalability without doubt Xorcom, for a tdm over ethernet RAD, for a solid proxy aware gateway Audiocodes, for a self-interested small system either Digium or Sangoma bus based hardware for cost/performance reasons.

Basically all the advise here is to belly up to the bar and use only hardware from a manufacturer that has actually invested into the VOIP community.

(I am supportive of Asterisk and FreePBX, they fill that PBX niche well, I do not use any particular distro as they are all in someway self limiting, but the core pair work very well in any linux based distro, JM2CWAE)