[asterisk-users] Which internet phone protocol best to choose

[Steve Totaro]

On Fri, Sep 12, 2008 at 7:43 PM, Tilghman Lesher
<tilghman at mail.jeffandtilghman.com> wrote:
> On Friday 12 September 2008 18:31:23 Alex Balashov wrote:
>> The short answer is SIP.
>>
>> Stefan Gofferje wrote:
>> > http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-IAX
>> > http://www.voip-info.org/wiki-IAX+versus+SIP
>> > http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+IAX+clients
>
> The longer and more accurate answer is that it depends on what you're doing
> and what your goals are.  If you need to be able to pierce firewalls and
> handle NAT easily, especially in areas where a government-controlled telephone
> monopoly might be hostile to VoIP, then IAX2 is for you.
>
> If, on the other hand, interoperability and choice of phones are what you
> need, then SIP is pretty much a no-brainer.
>
> Of course, nothing prevents you from using SIP for phones and IAX2 for
> backbone, either.  Notably missing to this discussion are the MGCP and H.323
> protocols, which probably aren't much use to you, unless you need to connect
> to certain VoIP providers who haven't yet upgraded their equipment to the 21st
> century.
>
> --
> Tilghman
>

I think the most notably missing solution is OpenVPN and SIP.

One port for the tunnel, encrypted traffic, benefits of IAX as far as
firewalls and hostile governments (BTW, IAX2 is not as obscure as it
once was, therefore, the hostile government argument is not as
anywhere as strong as a VPN).

Since you will be running SIP over the VPN, you get the
interoperability that SIP provides.

I am sure you could pretty quickly find someone to offer you the
gateway side of the VPN for a small charge, or a virtual hosted server
should do fine.  I have not looked but there may be some VoIP
providers that offer or would accommodate OpenVPN tunnels.

Thanks,
Steve Totaro