[Asterisk-Dev] Petition for IAX firmware

[Steve Kann]

On Apr 5, 2005, at 10:49 PM, Paul wrote:

> denon wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I've put together a quick petition, in hopes that we can possibly 
>> persuade Sipura (or any other large-scale IP handset manufacturer) to 
>> include firmware support for IAX. The IAXy has proven that an IAX 
>> product is in demand, and very useful, and I think we'd all like to 
>> see a handset manufacturer follow Digium's lead. I'm not particularly 
>> endorsing Sipura, however I do know that they have seriously 
>> considered support for IAX, and have decided to hold off until "the 
>> demand is there". I'm hoping that with some numbers, we can prove to 
>> them that the demand is already here, and that IAX is already a 
>> viable technology.
>>
>> I'd like to encourage everyone to show your support -- hopefully 
>> Sipura, and/or other manufacturers will see these hard names and 
>> numbers, and realize it's time to move something into production.
>>
>> Petition:
>> http://www.petitiononline.com/IAXPhone
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> -d
>
> I like to see IAX support in any phone or ata. As for the benefits of 
> IAX trunking: Suppose that you have 4 SPA-2000 devices at a branch 
> office with IAX trunking back to headquarters? You won't be getting 
> the best bandwidth usage unless you also run a * server at the branch 
> office to aggregate those 8 extensions into one trunk. Otherwise you 
> have 4 trunks to the * server at headquarters. With 8 IP phones it's 
> even worse.
>
> So it looks like I need to have a linux box running at each location 
> where I want to use IAX trunking. I'm sure I can get the cost of that 
> down to something reasonable. I guess the next question is: It is much 
> easier to do IAX trunking if all the ata's and IP phones use IAX2 
> instead of SIP? A good example would be 8 IAXy devices as compared to 
> 4 2-port SIP ata's. Is the configuration going ot be easier? How about 
> performance and stability?
>
> Rather than petition Sipura, I would prefer that we convince Digium to 
> go further with the IAXy concept. Give us a base unit that accepts a 
> mix of fxo or fxs modules. Offer it in 2, 4 and 8 port versions. If 
> those 3 sizes will do trunking and offer the best free codecs, it will 
> eliminate the need for a * server to do trunking at a lot of 
> locations. Digium should do it first and let the others play catch-up 
> when they finally see the light.
>

I have two points to make:

1) If I were a vendor, and there was documentation on the IAX2 protocol 
(not even an RFC, but at least some kind of semi-official 
documentation), I'd be a lot more likely to implement it.

2) The idea of an IAX2 trunk-aggregator is interesting.  This is 
probably something that doesn't need a whole x86 linux box -- taking 
multiple IAX2 streams and putting them into trunks is trivial in terms 
of computational requirements..  A small microcontroller or an ARM chip 
is more than enough for this, and would be a neat idea of virtual PBX 
deployments..

-SteveK