[asterisk-users] Unicall, not HOW but WHY

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Thu, Jul 20, 2006 at 03:51:25PM -0500, Moises Silva wrote:
> >1) Why do the zaptel and librpi drivers and libraries pretend to
> >"handle"  E1 cards, but apparently know nothing about the MFCR2 protocols?
> >Is there any other normal way to use the E1's (with respect to telephony)
> 
> Zaptel is the driver code. Does not need to know anything about higher
> level protocol handling like MFCR2 or PRI. It only handles link level
> stuff, line coding, framing etc. Zaptel cards can be used for non
> voip, or telephony purposes, like connecting to the Internet through
> HDLC.
> 

Do you have the patch to support MFCR2 for libpri or whatever?

> >2) Why the Unicall package? Not *how* but *why*.
> 
> You are not forced to use Unicall, but AFAIK, libmfcr2 is the only
> MFCR2 open source library and since libmfcr2 was wrote by the same guy
> that wrote Unicall telephony abstraction (Steve Underwood), makes
> sense to use it. However you can use Asterisk Zapata channels with
> MFCR2 support, that way you skip the Unicall thing, however, Zapata
> would still be using libmfcr2, and I think there is even less
> documentation about using Zapata with libmfcr2 than using Unicall with
> libmfcr2.

AFAIK, the "MFCR2 support" in chan_zap doesn't actually work and was
Steve Underwood's first shot at the problem. I believe it is to be
removed from 1.4.

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