VoIP-Forum

Lately, especially when training people in Asterisk, I\’ve been looking at some of the basic concepts in Asterisk with new eyes. One of the concepts is the SIP user, peer and friends. This concept came from the IAX channel, which has a protocol that clearly defines a user that places a call and a peer that receives a call. In the SIP channel, I find this very confusing as soon as you are trying to do something different from connecting a phone directly to your Asterisk server.
  In Asterisk CVS head, version 1.1dev, I\’ve added the capability to configure the peer with the same variables as previously only existed in a user. A SIP peer now supports all of the SIP device configuration settings. With this part done, I\’ll start experimenting with using the peer as both a peer and a user. One object, one client. Let\’s call that configuration object a phone or a client.

After that is done, I\’ll start with trying to simplify configurations for a service - connecting to a SIP provider with Asterisk as a SIP phone client - and a trunk - connecting to a gateway or another Asterisk server. The goal is to make connecting to a SIP service provider like Broadvoice, BBtele.se or FreeWorldDialup a much more simple process. Today, it is way too complicated and hard to explain.

Introducing The Asterisk Realtime Architecture - ARA

The Asterisk Realtime Architecture is a new set of drivers andfunctions implemented in Asterisk 1.1dev (and the following v1.2 stable).The benefits of this architecture are many, both from a code managementstandpoint and from an installation perspective. This article introduces you to the ARA. 

The ARA is designed to be independent of storage. Currently, mostdrivers are based on SQL, but the architecture should be able to handleother storage methods in the future, like LDAP.efit comes in the database support. In Asterisk v1.0 somefunctions supported MySQL database, some PostgreSQL and other ODBC.With the ARA, we have a unified database interface internally in Asterisk,so if one function supports database integration, all databases that has arealtime driver will be supported in that function. (more…)

I just placed a call to my business partner - on the flight between Stockholm and Chicago. He\’s connected to a wireless network on a SAS Flight, connecting with the IPsando IAXphone software to an Asterisk server. Apart from the cost of the Wireless access, we had a free call between Sweden and an airplane above Greenland.

We had 1 second latency but almost no jitter, so it was a bit like the old satellite phone connections across the atlantic. But it worked!

Amazed. On Friday, I will travel to VON in San José. You can rest assured that I will call everyone I know from the plane! Asterisk and VoIP takes off!