Digium launches their standalone G100 and G200 VoIP gateways, which negate the need for a TDM (T1/E1) card to be installed in your Asterisk server. Both products are fanless and have no moving parts, which means higher reliability. Further, many Asterisk deployments are now happening in virtualized environments or in the cloud where you cannot have a dedicated TDM card installed. These two VoIP gateways support TDM-to-SIP, SIP-to-TDM and SIP-to-SIP (transcoding) applications to bridge the TDM and SIP worlds. These two products are a nice evolution from the Digium R-Series I first saw at Astricon. Come to think of it I believe Digium's Steve Sokol showed me a beta of their G100 & G200 products at Astricon.

The gateways feature a power-saving embedded design with a
highly efficient digital signal processor (DSP) handling all media-related
operations. The G100 includes a single software-selectable T1/E1/PRI interface and supports up to 30 concurrent calls. The G200 doubles the
capacity with two T1/E1/PRI interfaces and up to 60 concurrent calls.
Both models have integrated echo cancellation and a small 1U half-width / half-length footprint.

Features / specs of both the G100 & G200 include:

• Automatic Call Type Detection: Voice/Modem/Fax
• Answer and Disconnect Supervision
• Trunk Group Support
• Dial Plan Support
• Call Routing Rules
• Call Routing Groups
• Pass Through Support for calls to toll free, local and emergency services numbers
• Automatic appending and stripping of digits to dialed numbers
• Caller ID name and number support
• Fax and Modem support
• IP Telephony:
• -SIP (Support for multiple SIP endpoints)
• -Audio Codecs
• --G.729
• --G.726
• --G.711 (Coding Support for A-law and u-law)
• --GSM-FR
• --G.722
• -Auto Codec Negotiation
• -Fax and Modem Support (T.38 and G.711)
• T1 Signaling:
• -PRI Signaling protocols:
• --National ISDN-1
• --National ISDN-2
• --4ESS (AT&T)
• --5ESS (Lucent)
• --DMS100 (Nortel)
• --Q.SIG
• T1 CAS :
• --E&M
• --E&M Wink
• --Feature-Group-D (DTMF, MF)
• --FXS Loop Start with Forward Battery Disconnect
• --FXS Loop Start
• --FXS Ground Start
• --FXO Loop Start with Battery Disconnect Supervision
• --FXO Loop Start
• --FXO Ground Start
• E1:
• PRI (EuroISDN or Q.SIG)
• DTMF Signaling via RFC 2833

The G100 retails for $1,195, while the G200 retails for $1,995. This is considerably cheaper than many competitors, including the Sangoma Vega 400 1 T1/E1, which costs nearly $3000. However, the Digium G100/G200 products are not edge devices. They don't have any firewall capabilities - they strictly do TDM-to-SIP conversion. I'd also like to see Digium add some FXS ports to these VoIP gateway appliances for connecting legacy analog fax devices, credit card machines, etc. You can of course buy separate devices to do that, but an all-in-one T1/E1 + 4-port or 8-port FXS/FXO option would be nice. Still, these two VoIP gateway products from Digium will make some waves in VoIP land...