[Asterisk-Users] Re: iax or sip

[Randy Bush]

>> iax uses udp and traverses nats.  neither of these seems
>> useful to me.  i loathe nats, and udp is not well-behaved in
>> the sense of congestion avoidance.
> You may indeed loathe NATted networks, but in general they're
> very hard to avoid.  Why would you criticize a protocol for
> dealing with such a thing efficiently--which, quite famously,
> SIP does not?

i did not criticize the protocol.  remember, my question started
with

>> i am looking at iax to see if it is applicable to my needs.

i don't need nats, nat traversal, nat anything.  if i did, iax
might well be one of the technologies i would consider.  but i
don't.

> Do you know of a successful VoIP protocol that is entirely
> TCP-based?

not currently, though folk are working hard on the congestion
friendliness issue.  if you're interested, i can point you to
the relevant part of the ivtf basement.

> I would want the PBX in the datastream in cases where multiple
> endpoint connections would pass through multiple IAX boxen

why?  and yes, i mean the question.  i see setup running through
the boxen, of course.  i just don't see why you would want the
payload to traverse what might be a pretty baroque multi-
continental path.  i may have big pipes, but the bleedin' speed
of light seems not to be very impressed.

> Perhaps in your case your networks are all public-IP, running
> on DS3s or OC48s.

well not ds3s, stm-1 and above.  but i ain't a big fan of wasting
bytes.  i am also not a fan of triangle routing.

and maybe we could avoid the ad homina which seems to be too
frequent on this list?

randy