[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk and SER

[Daniel Salama]

I have been reading about integrating Asterisk with SER to help  
Asterisk deal with large volume of registrations (mainly). I was  
planning on fronting Asterisk with SER for that purpose. Not that I  
have the traffic at this moment, but because I wanted to get the  
infrastructure in place.

However, my providers are using G711 codec and I offer G711 and G729  
to my clients because they don't have the best broadband service  
available. So, if my clients are talking G729, I suppose I will have  
to always keep Asterisk in the media path so as to do codec  
translation. Is that correct? I was also planning on using SER's  
nathelper, but if Asterisk _HAS_ to be in the media path, there may  
not be a need for SER's nathelper. Is this assumption correct?

If my purpose of using SER is basically to alleviate registration  
load and help route (possibly load balance) traffic among multiple  
Asterisk servers as well as SIP providers, do I really need SER?  
Would you recommend it? Granted, I have been running both Asterisk  
and SER as separate systems for a while and they both seem very  
stable to me.

Thanks,
Daniel