One of the knocks against the Digium line of boards for the Asterisk open-source IP-PBX was its lack of hardware echo cancellation. This required you to do echo cancellation in software which is processor/resource intensive and limits scalability. Sangoma has been using Octasic's echo cancellation software embedded onto Sangoma's hardware boards which enables hardware echo cancellation. I met with Sangoma a few weeks ago and did a test drive on their hardware.

The Asterisk community has been clamoring for hardware echo cancellation for quite some time now. Well, Mark Spencer is certainly one to listed to the open source community, since his company, Digium, will announce this week that they are adding support for the Octasic echo cancellation algorithms to their telephony boards. This is big news for the Asterisk community! The new echo cancellation card features Octasic's certified carrier grade algorithms and is designed for optimum support of voice and data. The new transcoder card facilitates hardware transcoding, which decreases Asterisk's workload and the BRI card enables Basic Rate ISDN connectivity for European Asterisk users.