[asterisk-users] what is softswitch

[Matthew Fredrickson]

Alex Balashov wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Sep 2007, Anthony Francis wrote:
> 
>> IMHO asterisk is a softswitch, it may not be a very high capacity one 
>> (right now) but it can be and if you don't mind splitting your physical 
>> trunk calls over multiple machines it works very well as a call routing 
>> engine, you just need to have carefully designed plans. It is far to 
>> easy to create call routing loops, but if you don't know what you are 
>> doing with a real telephony switch you can do the same.
> 
>    No SS7/ISUP support (and no TCAP, which is required for LNP and LIDB and 
> traditional CNAM), poor/incomplete IMT support, can't take more than a few 
> T1s per host - if that. No GR.303 support.

Actually, I have been working on an SS7 stack for asterisk called 
libss7.  SS7 support is already in trunk, and should be in the next 
stable release of Asterisk.  Right now it only does ISUP/MTP3/MTP2, but 
with some work an effort, SCCP/TCAP/LNP support could be implemented as 
well.

Asterisk has had GR.303 support for a while, though I don't think it's 
asymmetric (it only supports one particular function of it, or something 
like that IIRC).

-- 
Matthew Fredrickson
Software/Firmware Engineer
Digium, Inc.