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How to meet VoIP bandwidth requirements without crippling your network performance?
If you don't consider your bandwith requirements when building a VoIP infrastructure, you'll wind up with an unreliable system and an overtaxed WAN. Learn More.

What is a Codec?
The word "codec" stands for COder-DECoder. It is a mechanism to encode and decode information into and out of a compressed format. In the telecoms world, a codec is generally used to compress digital voice signals so that they occupy less bandwidth during transmission. This compression enables carriers to serve more subscribers with less bandwidth.

What is Transcoding?
As a digital voice packet is transmitted, it may need to traverse several different networks en route to its final destination. It is quite possible that the networks along the path do not use a common codec (this may be due to differing bandwidth constraints or other requirements.)

In these cases, when the packet reaches a network boundary, it is necessary to decode it from its current codec format and then re-code it into the required new codec format before it can enter the next network. This process is known as transcoding.

What is a DSP?
A specialised chip designed to perform speedy and complex operations on analogue or digital data. However, extensive software development, hardware engineering, and manufacturing resources are required to develop a solution using this technology, and the implementation of the entire system is always highly bespoke.

Additionally, their limited individual processing capacity means a large number of DSPs are required to concurrently process the large number of calls typically managed by carriers today. This results in substantial power, cooling and space requirements for hardware using this technology, as well as expense.

What is a Softswitch?
A softswitch is a central device in a telecommunications network which connects calls from one phone line to another, entirely by means of software running on a computer system. This work was formerly carried out by hardware (generally DSPs), with physical switchboards to route the calls.

What size is the Open Source PBX Market?
Open Source represents 18% of all PBX sales in North America. It now accounts for more lines than any single conventional PBX or key system manufacturer. *Source: Eastern Management Group.

What is a Cell Processor?
IBM‘s Cell processor is a single chip, multi-core, parallel- processing device. Each processing core is connected to every other core via an extremely high speed, on-chip, circular bus. There is a single, core CPU (the Power Processing Engine or PPE) that routes work to eight smaller (but powerful) siblings called Synergistic Processing Engines, or SPEs. The end result is an architecture that delivers over 200 billion floating-point operations per second (>200 GigaFLOPS).