Hey guys,
I’m looking to get started with freePBX and Asterisk. I was wondering if anyone had any pointers to hardware for connecting to FXO, FXS. The only thing I’m familiar with is Digium, but that seems a bit pricy. I was wondering if there are any alternatives people can recommend, with which they’ve had good experience.
Any help would be much appreciated. 
I’ve seen a TDM800 card made by 'Yeastar’
This is around $300 including modules for all eight ports.
It looks like good value, I’ve one on order to try…
Once it arrives I will report back with the results.
At the moment I’m using a Sipura (now linksys) SPA3000 and a SPA2100 plus a Polycom phone on my home system. This works, but the echo canceller in the SPA3000 trunk port is not very effective. This could be due to other devices on the line messing up the matching.
Thanks Robert.
It feels like the Digium products are marked up quite a bit. But apparently the cheaper clone cards have issues. But with the way technology is now I figure it’s only a matter of time before someone makes a decent card at a decent price (if it hasn’t been done already )
The most popular are Digium, Rhino and Sangoma (in alphabetical order). Another one is PIKA Technologies. I have not heard any feedback on their cards yet but you may want to take a look at them too.
Sangoma is the cadillac. Rhino is late to the party and not quite there yet but has potential. Digium is the sentimental favorite. Still way too early to tell what sort of impact Pika will have. It takes years to get this stuff right and they are very new at the asterisk end of things…it’s a wait and see. The chinese stuff is…well it’s just cheap.
Sangoma is the best because they use a custom FPGA designed specifically for the appliation it is used for and can be upgraded with firmware in the field. Hence IRQ/compatibility issues are rare to non-existant, any issues that do come up are fixed quickly, and it seems to scale well without quality issues. The Octasic HWEC they use is second to none. The company itself is highly focused and they do what they do very well!
Rhino has a custom ASIC doing much the same thing as Sangoma at a lower unit cost but their drivers are immature and they have a different product strategy with a broader less focussed business.
Digum uses generic hardware/reference designs that were never really intended for what they are doing with it and it shows in all the problems with compatibility/quality. I haven’t seen much in the way of quality hardware designs from them but perhaps that is slowly changing. Only time will tell.