Are there really NO minipci gsm channels available?

Hi,

I was planning on adding a GSM channel to my asterisk system by installing a Huawei minipci GSM modem into the minipci slot.

But it looks like there is no software or driver support for asterisk to use a minipci card as a GSM or CDMA channel ?

How can this be ? Why would there be no support at all for minipci cards ?

Thanks.

Probably because Huawei hasn’t written one. Possibly because it is a market they don’t consider important.

I don’t know about Huawei, but there are a lot of hardware manufacturers out there who refuse to provide the documentation needed to write open source drivers.

I don’t think you understand my question …

I am pretty sure there are lots of minipci mobile cards that work just fine in linux and BSD.

I am asking why isn’t there a way to use any minipci cards as a channel in asterisk ? It appears that there is no minipci equivalent of chan_mobile, and I cannot understand why … ?

The main backer of Asterisk doesn’t sell such a card, so they are not going to contribute code. It looks as though you are not going to contribute code. WHoe do you think has the motive to donate code?

Also, a lot of hardware is only supported at the Windows device driver level. How many of these cards have Linux drivers, or have a programming model that is in the public domain?

No, there are many minipci GSM cards with linux drivers - here is an example:

forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1332648

so it’s just a question of how to add it as a channel.

The real question is: how is it that I am the only person that has ever wanted this ??

Simple answer, no one are interested in the use of such device or buy such device. Having Linux driver didn’t mean that asterisk must be supported too.

hello:
there is a card from sangoma supported pci. of course, you can use minipci to convert PCI if you want. the driver support asterisk and dahdi. please refer this:
wiki.sangoma.com/W400-Quad-GSM-Card

Note that a number of people have reported that that Sangoma will not provide support for configuring Asterisk to use their cards.

Hello,

I work for Sangoma as an engineering manager.

I can confirm Sangoma very much supports W400 cards for Asterisk.

We even proposed an official patch for Asterisk that was NOT vendor-specific (it works with any card using GSM AT command set) but the patch was rejected by Digium product management (even after Digium engineering gave the ok to proceed with the patch). You can see the reasoning and discussion here:

issues.asterisk.org/jira/browse/ASTERISK-19561

Even when not accepted officially, Sangoma still does and will continue to support W400 cards and the libwat library to be used with Asterisk and other platforms (such as FreeSWITCH)

Cheers,

Moy