[Asterisk-Users] Ser vs Asterisk?

[Anton Tinchev]

Rich Adamson wrote:

> Could someone give me a 10,000 foot view of what the differences are
> between Ser and Asterisk?
> 
> I'd like to implement one or the other handle a small number of local
> ip phones, tie a couple of asterisk (or ser) machines together across
> the Internet, implement a couple of FX gateways (to handle incoming
> pstn calls, and for outgoing pstn calls), and use features mostly
> common to pbx's. No immediate need for CDR. Voice mail, callerid, etc,
> are wanted.  Would like to accept incoming sip calls from anyone on
> the Internet that might choose to call.
> 
> Would Ser or Asterisk be the most appropriate choice?
> 
> Rich
I using both in heavy production enviroment.
SER is the BEST SIP proxy that i found. But it is just sip proxy.
And can serve a _LOT_ connections (10,000 users, 20 cals per second).

Asterisk is more like telephone switch with lot of features, but far slower.

In your scenario - Asterisk. SIP cannot act as a PSTN Gateway (PC with some telephone board).

Mixed scenario - Voice mail, PSTN GWs, Conference ... - Asterisk. Call routing - SIP.

You can implement SER only scenario, if you use Hardware Gateways - Cisco AS5350.
But i don't recommend you to use HW Gateways - main problem is that this gateways still don't support the speex codec,
so if you make long distance calls between, let say, AS5350 and Asterisk you can't use low bandwidth codec. .........