[Asterisk-Dev] Petition for IAX firmware

[Michael Giagnocavo]

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-dev-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Paul
Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2005 8:50 PM

>I like to see IAX support in any phone or ata. As for the benefits of 
>IAX trunking: Suppose that you have 4 SPA-2000 devices at a branch 
>office with IAX trunking back to headquarters? You won't be getting the 
>best bandwidth usage unless you also run a * server at the branch office 
>to aggregate those 8 extensions into one trunk. Otherwise you have 4 
>trunks to the * server at headquarters. With 8 IP phones it's even worse.

Not sure what the trunking has to do with anything, but the PA168 already
has support for IAX2 and it works quite well. Call quality is excellent (and
that's from me in Guatemala, with crap connections). Best of all, if you
want to work on the firmware, Centrality is VERY open in as far as letting
you get access to the parts you need. They are also very responsive in
adding new features (for instance, they are working on adding iLBC codec,
and have said they will work on Speex after that). The phones have firmware
for SIP, H323, IAX2, Net2Phone, and MGCP.

I've used IP phones and ATAs built on the PA168 and it's great. The downside
is that it's based on Intel 8051, and simply doesn't have enough power to
handle multiple audio streams or do much more than a call (so, no 3-way
conferencing). Currently the IAX2 firmware lacks in a few areas. But anyone
can add on features, and I just added one feature to it, and now I'm working
on adding native and attended transfers. (Granted, I'm soo far from an
expert on this it might take me a while :P).

The PA168 is sold by lots of people, myself included. Email me if you'd like
more info. Or Google around... there's lot of hardware based on it.

What we really should have a petition for is for hardware device
manufacturers to stop being so idiotic about their firmware and follow
people like Centrality (or Roku, who makes those media player devices) and
others who allow you to extend the device via an API. Even Microsoft's
products are infinitely more open than most devices' software.

-Michael