[Asterisk-Users] VOCAL + Asterisk

[Jean-Michel Hiver]

Akpome Akpoguma a écrit :

> I want to start a community based voip network projcet and am thinkimg 
> of using VOCAL and asterisk gateways..... my question is, has anyone 
> bench marked asterisk vs VOCAL? is it a wise idea to use VOCAL + 
> Asterisk or Asterisk all the way.........am expecting 1000 -> 5000 
> users..

Apparently the way to do it is to use SER to handle all the SIP fluff 
(REGISTERs mostly) and then use Asterisk as a gateway for PSTN access. I 
used to do it but then realized that I didn't need it since I work 
mostly with wholesalers and don't have that much SIP signaling to deal 
with anyway.

Then after that, you can use Asterisk simply as a B2BUA. As long as you 
don't do any transcoding, you will be fine. Currently I have 15-20k 
minutes daily going through an Asterisk box which just does two things:

- Keep CDRs records in a database (using cdr_odbc)
- Does dialplan functions (prefix manipulation, access control using 
contexts), load balancing (to balance traffic between multiple gateways, 
using Macros and Random()), and least cost routing.

The machine is rather low-end (Sempron 2400+, 1 Gb RAM) but the load 
average is only about 0.2 and the CPU usage is around 10%. So for a low 
price tag of around €500 per unit, I can easily afford to have a second 
machine which can quickly take over if the main is down.

All the transcoding and the echo cancellation is being handled by 
proprietary SIP VoIP gateways such as Audiocodes (excellent hardware, I 
recommend it).

I use FreeBSD + Postgresql + unixODBC + Asterisk. I have set up a 
minimal Asterisk (use autoload = no in your modules.conf) and Asterisk's 
memory footprint is around 28M. The machine doesn't swap or hang... 
after a lot of research it seems I've found the combination which works 
for me! It took me two days + one sleepless night to set up though :)

Cheers,
Jean-Michel.

-- 
Jean-Michel Hiver - http://ykoz.net/
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