[asterisk-ss7] some interesting features for the roadmap

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hello list,

(cross posted to ss7 list cause of the first point)

as my work during the last week i have noticed some limitations to
asterisk in a high level carrier setup like a typical voice carrier.
I want to bring up two features to discuss if they could be interesting
for the community to make asterisk more compantative against typical
legacy switching equipment.

*) Making asterisk an IN plattform
Asterisk right now can handle most of the common usecases to replace a
very expensive IN system from a typical switch vendor like NSN,
Ericsson, ...
These features are routing on A-Numbers, B-Numbers, time & date based,
... and also approve media like playback some audio files, IVRs, MoH,
record calls...

The only thing that asterisk would need to learn is talking INAP which
is part of the SS7 signaling section. All other requierements are
allready there.

Just to give you an idea about what a typical IN plattform costs. These
systems normally costs around 300.000 $ and upgrade one E1 for media
normally cost around 50.000 $ and the features are mostly only the above
things.

*) uaCSTA support
I know there have been many guys saying they want to build a CSTA <->
Ami interface but i only found one finished solution so far and also the
opencsta server isnt ready for it. But then i have read about ua CSTA or
TR-087 which sounds like much easier to implement into asterisk cause we
allready have a running sip stack to use.
uaCSTA would open the door to many industrial standart software vendors
for CTI applications, Callcenter Solutioins... in a large enterprise
segment, where asterisk was not very noticeable lately.

Maybe there are some parts of interest for the community or digium
itself, so we can start thinking about putting this on the roadmap.


Best regards

stefan