Comments on: Memo to Asterisk PCI Card Manufacturers: Please Build This! http://www.voipsupply.com/blog/memo-to-asterisk-pci-card-manufacturers-please-build-this Everything you need to know about VoIP Fri, 18 May 2012 11:50:55 -0400 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 hourly 1 By: roderickm http://www.voipsupply.com/blog/memo-to-asterisk-pci-card-manufacturers-please-build-this/comment-page-1#comment-23812 roderickm Mon, 08 Dec 2008 18:21:10 +0000 http://blog.voipsupply.com/?p=4572#comment-23812 When I visit my favorite online t-shirt seller Threadless.com, they offer each t-shirt design in a variety of sizes, colors, and types (guys tee, girly tee, hoody, etc). They helpfully group the options together on one page to show all the configurations available for that design, while showing the variation in pricing and inventory/availability. You might consider the same for your online store, grouping the combinations in a condensed, easy-to-understand way. Perhaps a dropbox for the 28 FXO/FXS choices and a checkbox for whether to include hardware echo cancellation. That would reduce 56 SKUs to one sales page for the PCI cards, and you might do the same for the PCIe base card, the AEX2400. You mentioned environmental concerns -- building a card that included twice the number of ports required (just in case a customer wants to change all their FXO ports to FXS) is wasteful by definition... and more expensive for everyone involved. If given the choice between an all-FXO card and a switchable FXO/FXS card that cost say, 65-85% more, how many customers would pay the premium? It's actually very "green" to offer 112 different configurations with just five parts: PCI base card, PCIe base card, echo cancelling DSP module, 4-port FXO module, and 4-port FXS module. When I visit my favorite online t-shirt seller Threadless.com, they offer each t-shirt design in a variety of sizes, colors, and types (guys tee, girly tee, hoody, etc). They helpfully group the options together on one page to show all the configurations available for that design, while showing the variation in pricing and inventory/availability.

You might consider the same for your online store, grouping the combinations in a condensed, easy-to-understand way. Perhaps a dropbox for the 28 FXO/FXS choices and a checkbox for whether to include hardware echo cancellation. That would reduce 56 SKUs to one sales page for the PCI cards, and you might do the same for the PCIe base card, the AEX2400.

You mentioned environmental concerns — building a card that included twice the number of ports required (just in case a customer wants to change all their FXO ports to FXS) is wasteful by definition… and more expensive for everyone involved. If given the choice between an all-FXO card and a switchable FXO/FXS card that cost say, 65-85% more, how many customers would pay the premium?

It’s actually very “green” to offer 112 different configurations with just five parts: PCI base card, PCIe base card, echo cancelling DSP module, 4-port FXO module, and 4-port FXS module.

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