[asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

[Alex Balashov]

Tzafrir Cohen wrote:

> Yeah, right. And we have no SIP compatibility issues at all. It is also
> funny that you reflect the quality of old PRI card of one company and
> yet ignore all the past mishaps of SIP devices.

Oh, no, I didn't mean to imply that.  There are plenty of SIP interop 
problems with Asterisk as well.  I was actually just debugging a really 
recondite one yesterday with MetaSwitch.

But nothing quite so dramatically abysmal as the TDM stuff.  Of course, 
that could just be my particularly unfortunate experiences or 
shortcomings;  I make no claim as to the universality of what I am saying.

> I have stared long enough in both PRI traces and SIP traces. Both
> protocols are complex. I've seen very strange things happening with SIP.

Agreed, most certainly.

In fact, it's funny how often I've heard that SIP is a "simple" 
protocol.  "Oh, you know, it's like HTTP, basically."  Um, no, simple it 
is not.

> Now please be specific about what is wrong with running a T1 into a PC.

I don't have a lot of specific objections, as I am not a hardware 
expert.  I was just commenting on what seems to work well and what doesn't.

If I had to speculate, there are backplane/bus throughput and timing 
differences between dedicated, embedded TDM hardware chassis with T1 
interfaces and PC motherboards with offboard cards.  One surely must be 
more imprecise, inconsistent and replete with compatibility problems 
than the other.

I could be very wrong.

> I heard some people run Gigabit-ethernet into a standard PC. But maybe 
> that also takes a dedicated cisco gateway.

Ethernet is a data animal, not a synchronous voice animal.

But then, a goat is not a synchronous voice animal either.

-- 
Alex Balashov
Evariste Systems
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