[Asterisk-Users] ACT Gateways

[Benjamin on Asterisk Mailing Lists]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004 16:55:55 +1300, sgup015 at ec.auckland.ac.nz
<sgup015 at ec.auckland.ac.nz> wrote:
> I would say Asterisk would work with any SIP device out there, it would depend
> upon your individual configurations.  As long as the device SIP/IAX/H323 it
> should be straight forward to get it plugged into Asterisk.

Gettting "plugged in" perhaps, but "work" is a different matter. I
have seen it many times that certain SIP devices needed a firmware
upgrade to work with certain other devices, including Asterisk.

For example, the Hitachi Cable WIP-5000 WiFi SIP phones only worked
with Asterisk at a meeting with Hitachi Cable here in Tokyo *after*
their technicians upgraded the firmware. Then when we got two test
units, apparently with different firmware, they didn't work.

Some time ago ACT's SIP phones showed some really weird behaviour with
older Asterisk versions, ie you could only dial once and then the
phone would lock up and needed a reboot. Although this was only with
older versions of Asterisk and everything worked fine with more recent
versions, ACT fixed this, just to make sure.

Sometimes it is very small things. Say, music on hold features or
message waiting indicators etc etc etc. If such features don't work
properly, you can still use the phones, but you would really want to
use the full feature set.

So, it is indeed quite helpful if a vendor takes Asterisk serious
enough to look into any interoperability issues that might pop up.

As far as ACT are concerned, I am very happy with their commitment and
attitude towards Asterisk. Of course many other vendors will by now
also have recognised Asterisk as a significant platform that they
should support without any buts and ifs, but this is still not
something you can take for granted, as the Hitachi example shows.

rgds
benjk

-- 
Sunrise Telephone Systems, 9F Shibuya Daikyo Bldg., 1-13-5 Shibuya,
Tokyo, Japan.

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