[Asterisk-Users] why even use SIP

[Scott Bussinger]

> I'm testing a softphone-only setup (SJPhone with Plantronics
> 80 Headsets plugged into Soundcard) with around 40 users for
> that are linked over LAN in an organization of around 300
> people and never had any of the problems you described (the
> test is going for over a month now).

I'm glad it worked for you. In my case it generally worked pretty well for
me as an individual, but as soon as we ramped it up for real use by more
than 1 or 2 people it pretty much fell apart. X-Lite had the feature set we
needed, but voice quality was terrible and was full of clicks. All of the
IAX softphones based on the iaxclient library had the same problem with too
long a delay in them. Most of the softphones were not useful to use because
they were frankly too hard to use for average users. And on it went.

> I'm using iLBC codec and the Asterisk is running on a PIII PC
> with 256 MB RAM :-)

I tried ulaw, gsm, and speex codecs and the results were pretty similar for
each. I ended up using ulaw internally and gsm to connect to the external
provider (to cut down bandwidth requirements).

> Outgoing calls to landline via VoipJet and sipsnip.de, incoming from
> FWD (landline number provided by ipkall.com for free).

I use FWD for my phone at home to connect to the office. I haven't had the
energy to tackle the SIP over NAT issues yet. :)

> We are pretty happy with this setup so far. Do you think
> there might be problems later?

If it's working for you, great! Our problems were noticable as soon as we
had 4 or 5 people on the phones at the same time so as long as you test it
carefully under realistic use you should be fine. I never could figure out
why my systems would never work well, but it just wasn't worth spending any
more time on (cheaper to just buy the hardphones which didn't have the
problem).

Be seeing you.