New Gateways Redefine Expectations of Usability and Price

March 26, 2012  Digium, Inc., the Asterisk® Company, today introduced the Digium G100 Gateway  and Digium G200 Dual Gateway , the first in a family of cost-effective VoIP gateways that simplify the process of deploying converged media networks. Built on a powerful combination of the Asterisk open source communications engine and a state-of-the-art embedded platform, the new gateways provide the best value for Asterisk communications solutions.

We’ve been a leader in the telephony gateway business indirectly for the past 10 years, We’ve sold over five million telephony ports in the form of interface cards which are frequently used to build gateways from standard PC hardware. We’re pleased to introduce another connectivity option for our customers with this new family of standalone gateways,  said Mark Amick, Digium’s director of product management. 

Digium’s gateways are built to support both TDM-to-SIP and SIP-to-TDM applications. In a TDM-to-SIP deployment, the gateway significantly reduces operating costs by connecting a legacy business phone system with dynamic SIP trunking services. SIP-to-TDM deployments use the gateway to connect a modern SIP communications system with T1/E1/PRI service from legacy carriers. Image of Digium G100 T1/E1/PRI Gateway

The gateway software is based on the Asterisk communications engine and is managed through Digium’s intuitive point-and-click GUI interface, which allows for easy navigation and effortless setup. The gateways feature a power-saving embedded design with a highly efficient digital signal processor (DSP) handling all media-related operations. The combination of an intuitive user interface, the flexibility of Asterisk and the purpose-built media processing capabilities of the DSP results in a gateway platform that outperforms the dated designs in the market today.

Digium continues to simplify the deployment of Asterisk-based networks with our recently announced IP phones, the new redundancy appliances and now the gateways, “Digium is empowering integrators and partners to deliver complete solutions based on systems designed by Digium for Asterisk. Amick continued. 

Digium’s new gateways represent a solution to one of the challenges associated with running Asterisk applications in virtualized environments. TDM interface cards require a card slot – something distinctly missing from virtual servers. By converting the media and signaling from TDM to SIP on a dedicated external device, Asterisk users can migrate applications to virtualized, hosted or cloud environments. 

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, a small footprint (1U, half-width, half-depth) and no failure-prone moving parts.