[Asterisk-dev] goiax expanded with free us domestic calling

[tim panton]

On 2 Oct 2005, at 20:54, Mark Aiken wrote:

> One thing that really puzzles me is why people keep inventing new  
> call control protocols now that SIP has proven itself and has been  
> adopted by all the major carriers and 3GPP.  Skype was a hit  
> because it solved one the major weakness of SIP - NAT traversal.  
> That problem is quickly going away and Skype's value is now its  
> user base as a P2P network. What does IAX bring to the table? Why  
> bother with Yet Another Call Control Protocol.

I'm not going to talk about skype - I'm ignorant of the details of  
the protocol etc
and this is veering far enough off topic as it is.

I'm quite fond of IAX - it is in the Unix tradition - do one thing  
and do it well.

I've written an IAX stack in my spare time - that works - in about 3k  
lines of Java.
I doubt you can even read the SIP spec in the time it took me to  
implement that :-)

I'm pretty sure Mark Spencer invented IAX exactly because he didn't  
want to
implement SIP, but wanted a simpler remote protocol for asterisk.

On the wire IAX is much leaner than SIP - and way more comfortable  
with firewalls.

It's always good to have a couple of options, otherwise the winner  
gets bloated.

I mean, imagine the trouble the OP would have had to have gone to to  
even
_think_ about adding a new SIP message and getting it adopted. With IAX
he just has to convince a few folks...

T.