[Gloucs] H323

[Maximillian Murphy]

> The big difficulty is that the IPv4 internet arguably ran out of
> addresses a long time ago, so many people use NAT/PAT routers to
> connect to broadband.  H.323 is very challenging indeed to set up
> across such a router - it really needs a real routable IP address at
> each end.
> 

Whereas Asterisk's IAX2 protocol is meant to be very simple and easy to set up.  It seemed as if the number of hardware devices supporting it was growing fast when I played with it a couple of years ago, and indeed a brief skim of VOIP hardphones on the web just now seemed to indicate that IAX2 is widely supported.  If SIP is over engineered then IAX2 is a unix command line utility.  It does one thing and does it well.  Supposedly.

I played with it only out of curiosity and in particular only over my home network.  If anyone would like to play with it please holler.  Always up for trying out something new!

I can't remember which softphone I used.  apt-cache shows two.  Iaxcomm, which looks familiar, and and kiax the description of which is:

" Kiax uses the Inter-Asterisk eXchange, or IAX (TM) Protocol, used as a native communication protocol between Asterisk PBX Servers. What is particularly good in it is that it requires only one UDP port per endpoint to create a successful communication channel for VoIP calls. This makes it much friendlier for users behind NAT, which is not the case with SIP and H.323 - they required specific router configurations for their channel establishment, thus hindering faster spread of VoIP on the home and corporate desktop."

Regards, Max