The OpenPCI card consists of a carrier card containing the PCI bus interface where up to two modules of the same or different line/station interfaces can be mounted on it. The GREEN module consists of 4 FXO ports while the RED module consists of 4 FXS ports allowing you to mix and match them.

The FXO ports also support a High Impedance (Hi-Z) logging mode suitable for tapping trunk lines or stations for call recording applications.

Configuration options include:

• 4 or 8 Loop-Start (FXO) ports. These ports are functionally and electrically equivalent to a telephone and are capable of terminating lines from an external exchange or PBX.
• 4 or 8 Station (FXS) ports. These ports enable you to power standard analogue telephone handsets.
• 4 FXO and 4 FXS ports, suitable for PBX applications.

The OpenPCI series has two RJ45 sockets which allows you to connect to the 8 ports. Voicetronix can provide Splitter Boxes to separate ports on each of the RJ45 sockets into four RJ11 sockets making it easier to connect to the PSTN or telephone handset. The Splitter Box and associated cabling are sold separately here at Voicetronix and are illustrated above.

The ability to provide a controlled method for trunk lines failing over to specified analogue handsets/stations offers PBX applications using commodity PC hardware redundancy in the event of a:

Knowing that you can still make and take calls in the above mentioned circumstances offers you piece of mind that your communication system won’t leave you completely stranded.

The Failover Box, pictured to the right, offers two RJ45 sockets for interfacing to the OpenPCI-8LS card and eight RJ11 sockets that interface to four trunk lines and four station/handsets. It also acts as a cable breakout/splitter box and is powered by a 9V AC 500mA power plug pack. It communicates with your server via a serial interface.

You don’t have to be using Voicetronix hardware to benefit from the Failover Box. When combined with our Splitter Boxes, the Failover Box may be used with other vendors' telephony cards that supply only RJ11 sockets. Such cards include Digium’s TDM800P, Sangoma’s A200 and Rhino's RH8Fxx series.

For more information check out our downloads page and download the Failover Box manual.

• The OpenPCI card seemlessly operates under both 5V and 3.3V PCI bus slots, freeing the developer to install it in a wide range of MOBO/servers.

All audio signal processing functionality has been moved to the Host PC (whether using Asterisk or our own vpb driver) to take advantage of the processing power of CPUs thus eliminating the requirement of on-board DSPs. This makes the telephony card more cost effective. The signal processing modules include:

• DTMF generation and cut-through detection. Cut-through detection enables the detection of DTMF tones whilst a voice message is playing. This is an essential feature in IVR, Auto-Attendant and Voicemail systems where experienced users can immediately press a specified digit on their telephone keypad to access the system without waiting to hear an entire voice prompt.
• Call Progress Analysis - monitors outgoing call activity including dialing, busy, ringback and disconnection.
• Generation and detection of user-defined programmable tones per channel - ideal for generating and detecting call progress tones from proprietary PABXs and the PSTN simultaneously.
• Caller Identification - provides telephone number information on the calling party before the call is answered. With this module, CT applications can pop vital caller information on operators screens or direct callers to appropriate operator queues before the calls are answered. This is a powerful feature in call centre applications.
• Echo Cancellation - improves the accuracy of the DTMF cut-through detection algorithm and the audio quality in IP-PBX gateway applications in circumstances where echo is prevalent.
• Software bridging suitable for Call conferencing applications.

All non-audio signal processing has been moved to an onboard ARM processor on the OpenPCI card. This reduces the host I/O communication load, enabling up to four OpenPCI 8 port version cards to operate on a single chassis.