On Wed, Jun 27, 2007 at 02:11:25PM +0100, MJ Ray wrote:
Brett Parker iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk wrote:
Aren't bad. I'd rather use IAX than SIP though, so I'd recommend: http://www.voiptalk.co.uk/
voiptalk works with SIP too, but I think you pay extra for voicemail. I heard good things about aql.com but that doesn't work with linphone.
Why IAX not SIP, in practical terms? What free software phones (not switchboards) have people actually got working with IAX? Any non-Gnome/KDE ones?
IAX is *much* easier for firewall config - it's a single port rather than a block of hundreds of random ports - so you don't need the sip tracking module only available in recent kernels - it's also good as a trunking protocol, dropping an aterisk box at the end behind a firewall is simple, and then you can do sip from the asterisk box.
As far as clients go, iaxComm is the only one I really used (I've got a bunch of SIP handsets and one IAX2 handset that I was using in combination with Asterisk so all hardware for most testing).
IAX is still UDP, so still fun with firewalls, and the comparisons I've seen seemed to concentrate on low-level technical differences of IAX and RTP, rather than the benefits of IAX and I'm not smart enough with this to convert the technicalities into features.
UDP isn't any different to TCP as far as firewall config is concerned - UDP that then says "yeah - you'll be wanting to connect on this 'ere bunch o' ports" is where the problems start - IAX doesn't suffer that.
Cheers,