[asterisk-dev] Feature request: Ability to assign which nic card or mac address to use for each trunk in sip.conf

[Jeff LaCoursiere]

On Fri, 29 May 2009, JwexlerAt MailDotCom wrote:

> It is an roadblock for those in Japan who desire to go open source and 
> with Asterisk. One alternative, of course, is for Japanese users to have 
> to give up on open source voip and pay exhorbinate purchase and 
> maintenance fees for NTT proprietary voip services. However, we are 
> talking about massive monetary amounts that only large businesses would 
> be able to justify paying.
>
> But, many people in the global community cherish and are passionate 
> about open source (including Asterisk) because it does provide a free, 
> community-driven, open alternative to big-business pricy solutions 
> around the world.
>
> So, yes, extending the capability of Asterisk to allow for assigning 
> trunks to specific nic cards would solve the problem over here with 
> overcoming the massive monopolist telecom company NTT's giving Japan 
> people no other alternatives to the purchase of NTT's own high-priced 
> technology and yes it would thereby solve the individuals' ability to 
> deal with that.

I think what was meant in the replay is that if this were done (and I am 
not saying that it wouldn't be at least an interesting feature) just to 
solve your problem with NTT, and they really care so much about it, it 
won't be long before that won't work either.

I'm a bit confused as to what exactly they are blocking, by the way.  Are 
you unable to get SIP to any provider BUT NTT?  What if the traffic is 
tunneled?  I find it hard to believe they have locked down their router to 
the point of denying ANY kind of VoIP access.  It just sounds like if you 
want to by service from THEM, you are limited in the manner you describe. 
It seems like a very odd limit.  Surely if they can sell you additional 
inbound DID numbers and the charges that go with them they wouldn't be 
trying to stop you from doing so.  Why do they care if it is one device or 
two behind their router that is receiving calls?  Do they charge you by 
the MAC address?  I'm really not understanding their reasoning.

>
> I think there have been countless other situations where Asterisk and 
> other open source products have countered monopolists with alternative 
> products for the masses including providing alternatives to Microsoft's 
> monopolistic efforts and as well as those of others. Further, in the 
> case of NTT, we are basically talking about helping an entire country of 
> people (not just a few individuals).
>

That is taking it a bit far - how many individuals in Japan (not 
companies) want to run asterisk in their homes?  Again I am not against 
the feature request - just want to point out that there is not "an entire 
country of people" beating down the door for this feature request.

> Additionally, it sounds like there are other benefits to this addition 
> as well as noted by xrg (reporter) 2009-05-25 00:52 who wrote: This 
> would be a major feature, better be developed against 1.6-trunk, not 
> 1.4. The feature would be the ability to bind to multiple interfaces for 
> sip.c and perhaps allow to explicitly choose the interfaces per sip 
> peer. Last time I'd seen the code, was doable but still required major 
> restructure there. IAX has such an infrastructure. At SIP, it is a 
> little more complicated, since SIP could be UDP and wouldn't have a 
> "connection". Multiple interfaces binding would also solve some routing 
> problems, like the case of multipath (*very* useful, once we could make 
> it work). I vote for the feature!
>

Personally I think multipath solutions don't belong in asterisk, but in 
upstream network equipment.

j