[Asterisk-Users] Re: iax or sip

[Sunrise Ltd]

>hide one end from the other.  I have a customer and a
carrier.  I
>don't want one to know who the other is lest they get
together
>and cut me out of the equation.

This is certainly a valid point *right now* at a time when
the industry is converting from PSTN to VoIP based
transport.

However, let's look a bit further down the road. For other
services that have gone internet, changing the underlying
technology has always come with a change in usage patterns
and business models following suit. There is no reason to
believe that telephony will be any different.

Most of what defines SIP is clearly intended for a PSTN
alike world. It is a reflection of the incumbents' wish
that they can keep the status quo by piggy packing PSTN
structures on top of TCP/IP.

But is this how things are likely going to turn out? I
tend to think not.

Some of us have already got Asterisk running on sub $500
hardware running embedded Linux. It is only a matter of
"when" not "if" that such devices will become commodity
items that you will be able to pick up at Walmart or Radio
Shack for about the same as a cordless phone base unit
today.

At that point, virtually every business and every
household will have such a box. Couple that with some
universal directory facility, ie ENUM and you have got a
ubiquitous peer-to-peer telephone network where telcos
will have no role to play other than providing the data
pipes.

I think everybody will agree that IAX is already perfectly
suited for this kind of environment. So where does this
leave SIP then?

Most of the eeg-laying-wool-milk-sau features in SIP won't
mean anything in this kind of environment since they are
made for telco centric networks not for all peer-to-peer
networks.

As far as NAT and firewall traversal goes, SIP proponents
are all too easy with offering workarounds that often
introduce unwanted side-effects and they justify this by
stating that NAT will go away with the advent of IPv6. I
find that rather surprising.

Let's face it, by the time that IPv6 is so widespread that
NAT is not an issue anymore, there will be no telcos left
to use all those SIP telco features because telephony will
be an all peer-to-peer affair.

And what space is left for value added services through
third party providers can easily be accommodated by IAX.

My conclusion is that IAX is far more future proof than
any other VoIP protocol we know about today. Future proof
in the sense of what the future is more likely to be, not
in the sense of what the incumbents would like the future
to be.

just my 2 cents
benjk

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