[Asterisk-Users] SER + Asterisk

[Begumisa Gerald M]

    > I know this may be a stupid question, but I would love to know the
    > answer to it.  This question was posted earlier this month with
    > apparently no replies.  Exactly why would you combine SER with
    > Asterisk? Like the OP said, Asterisk already handles SIP, and seems
    > to do a good job of it, so why use SER?

What I understand is that Asterisk is a kind of "middle man" who wants
everything to go through "him" :-) I.e Asterisk cannot work as a SIP proxy
As far as I know, it doesn't do stateless forwarding as SER does so you
can simulate the "forward()"ing that SER does in Asterisk except that in
the case of Asterisk, it hasn't quite "let go" of the call, the voice and
everything are still passing through it over to the other side where the
call was forwarded (Dial()ed to be exact) to.

http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-Asterisk+SIP+not-proxy

I guess also the scalability issues for SIP-only cases is something that
I've read about too, especially when stateless forwarding is used (in
SER).  Asterisk has many more features than SER e.g interfacing PSTN
hardware, more advanced Voicemail etc... so, I would think that usually
people who want to run "multi-featured, full PSTN interoperability and
highly scalable networks" use Asterisk + SER.

Hope that explains abit.


Rgds,
Gerald.