The OpenPCI series is Voicetronix’ new entry level CT hardware platform offering four and eight Loop-Start (FXO) or Station (FXS) ports on a PCI 2.2 bus interface running on Linux. It is suitable for low density PC based telephony applications including:

• IP-PBX and PC-PBX systems.
• Call Recording/Logging.
• Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Auto Attendant and Voicemail systems.

The OpenPCI hardware supports a number of open source telephony applications, providing developers with a powerful and considerable set of tools to quickly build a telephony solution for the price of a PC and the OpenPCI card. These applications include:

• Asterisk(tm), a complete open source PBX software platform providing all of the features you would expect from a PBX, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment. Coupled with the OpenPCI you can build a “Hybrid PBX”, giving your office connectivity to the analog PSTN, analog handsets and the flexibility of either VoIP for handsets or VoIP trunks using SIP, IAX or H.323.
• CT Server, a highly flexible client/server library written in Perl designed to be a rapid application telephony development platform for Voicetronix hardware. It is suitable for PBX, IVR, autoattendant and voicemail applications. CT Server, coupled with a Voicetronix built web GUI admin tool is called OpenPBX, not to be confused with the Asterisk-fork project of the same name.
• Logger, a voice recording/logging server configurable using web based GUIs and catering for analogue line interfaces through the Voicetronix OpenPCI and OpenLog cards.

The OpenPCI connects to the analog PSTN via two RJ-45 ports on the back of the card. The use of a pair of CAT-5 cables, split into their 4 constituent pairs, can be crimped with RJ-11 heads or punched down directly into a punch-down block such as the Dynacom 66 Block as sold on the Telephonyware website. Available as a purchase option are 2 break-out boxes, roughly the size of a deck of cards, cleanly convert 2 CAT-5 cables into 8 RJ-11 female interfaces.

Pricing and availability of the Voicetronix OpenPCI can be found here at Telephonyware.