[asterisk-dev] BRI support in chan_zap of asterisk 1.6?

[Faidon Liambotis]

Jean-Denis Girard wrote:
> Let me know if I can help debug zap support for BRI, I would really like 
> that to happen. During the last years using asterisk, I've been through 
> isdn4linux, bristuff, visdn, misdn, and I'm still looking for the 
> definitive solution.
Unfortunately and from my experience, there isn't one just yet.

mISDN is crap and last heard it's been acknowledged and rewritten from 
scratch.
zaptel is also of debatable quality (well, not for the kernel people who 
won't merge it unless hell freezes over).

On top of that there's either bristuff, which works OK but is 
essentially unsupported by both Digium and Junghanns.NET.

OTOH, Digium just doesn't commit on bringing proper BRI (or EuroISDN) 
support to libpri and asterisk on its own but opted to use a completely 
different ISDN stack (mISDN) altogether for their BRI cards.
Work is being done by Matthew, obviously, but afaik his time is mostly 
spent on libss7 these days.

vISDN was/is quite interesting but you can't use it with real ISDN 
hardware nowdays: while the ISDN stack is supposed to work and was once 
certified, the hardware drivers stopped to work after a major rewrite.
The original author, Daniele Orlandi, is employed by a company that 
makes a living by selling GSM cards using vGSM, another part of vstuff.
All of Daniele's work is being done on that part nowdays, unfortunately.

Suffice to say, i4l isn't suitable for telephony applications.

I'd really wish for a proper ISDN stack supporting all of EuroISDN 
features, including PtMP, that will get its way into the upstream Linux 
kernel (or at least the parts of it that make sense).

I'm not sure though if Digium would want that, considering that they're 
not going to be any disclaimers on code merged by Linux.

Dissapointing, isn't it?

Regards,
Faidon