[asterisk-users] NAT solutions

[Yuan LIU]

>From: Brad Templeton <brad+aster at templetons.com>
>
>On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 09:59:06AM +0000, Tim Panton wrote:
> > In the meanwhile, use IAX, which understands about NAT pretty well.
> > If you have multiple SIP phones on a LAN behind a NATing router, just
> > put a small asterisk box on the LAN. It can manage your hairpin
> > calls internally, save you bandwidth by trunking the IAX traffic
> > to the central asterisk and avoid all the NAT hassle by using
> > a single port (outgoing) and refreshing it often enough for the
> > router to hold it open.
> >
> > Tim Panton
> >
> > www.mexuar.net
> > www.westhawk.co.uk/
>
>IAX is a fine protocol as far as it goes, however this answer
>is really not a workable one.   There are only a few IAX phones,
>and they are not nearly as solid and full featured as the many
>SIP phones.   There are some IAX termination and origination
>providers, but there are far more SIP providers.
...
>IAX is great but SIP is also a reality, and putting
>Asterisk into the "just works" category is a really
>important milestone.  One I think that is intended
>to be improved a lot for 1.6.

I have a really dumb question.  It appears that Yahoo, MSN, AIM, you name 
them, they don't have a NAT problem, and some use SIP.  I don't think they 
all stay in voice path, either.  What takes?

Yuan Liu