[Asterisk-Dev] G729 in non-realtime mode - way forward for Asterisk?

[Benjamin on Asterisk Mailing Lists]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 15:10:19 +0300, joachim <zoachien at securax.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> With the time spent on this thread, i think you could all have bought some
> licenses. (& The development cost to create something to convert those
> messages will buy you some more).

If it was only for myself, I wouldn't even bother with G729. I am very
happy with ILBC, thank you very much. For our own purposes, G729 is
totally and utterly obsolete.

Howver, I have customers who would like to know how to work around the
considerable cost of G729 licensing when used for anything other than
a hobby or SOHO system where a G729 caller leaving a voice message
will probably only happen once or twice before the patents expire.

> I don't think 10$ a license is that much, and you could do all your prompts
> with that too.

I have already stated this at least twice before, so let me make this
very clear one more time:

Nobody cares about prompts.

> Its not 10$ a call, its 10$ / license.

No, it's 15.000 USD initial contract fee just for the privilege to be
able to purchase licenses and then it is 63.000 USD for the minimum
package of 50.000 channels (for Annex A and B). Further a contract
renewal fee of 7.500 USD every year.

Digium doesn't sell any G729 binaries for BSD, none for LinuxPPC, none
for Darwin and none for Solaris. Even going with the x86 platform, it
is 10$ per channel and if you run a redundant voicemail server where
you want to have -say- 50 concurrent voicemail channels capacity, then
that will cost you 2x50x10$ = 1000 USD for only 50 people being able
to leave voicemail just to cater for the possibility that they all
come in using G729. And of top of that, the licensing means extra
hassle, extra work, limitations managing your systems. All that extra
nonsense that you wouldn't need if it wasn't for the side effects of
the license management will cost the customer who wants to deploy such
a system several times more than the actual license fees. I know
because I had a few projects where we have run the numbers and in the
end the customer opted out of G729 altogether, which is what I always
recommend anyway.

However, if a batch conversion system or a batch conversion service
could be set up, such customers would have a reasonable and affordable
option to support G729 on their voicemail systems.

Besides, efforts to work around software patents is something we will
have to get used to if the open source movement is to have a future.
So, the exercise alone is well worth the effort.

rgds
benjk

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Tokyo, Japan.

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