[Asterisk-Dev] We can do better than Skype

[Steve Kann]

Daniel Pocock wrote:

> I believe IAX is much closer to achieving this goal than SIP or H323, 
> but Skype's protocol is more successful at getting through firewalls 
> and NAT because of two things (which I openly admit I haven't verified 
> myself, so please correct me if I've been mis informed):
> - all connections go back through a Skype server with a real IP, even 
> if calling user to user
> - they can tunnel through HTTP proxies
>
> Maybe we need to look at the possibility of IAX over HTTP and IAX over 
> TCP?

It's actually much easier to do IAX over HTTP or IAX over TCP, with IAX, 
that it would be to do the same for SIP or H323 because of IAX's 
nat-friendliness.

I actually have a system that does this already, but it's not 
open-source.  I think that you could use a zebedee tunnel (which is 
open-source) with IAX relatively easily, and then you'd get IAX over TCP 
with encryption.  It's obviously not so good w.r.t. jitter, but it 
should work.


-SteveK