asterisk users - Feb 2005 - re: difference between STUN servers and far-end solutions

Hi asterisk list,
 this is a bit off topic, but can anyone explain the point of the
commercial far-end solutions floating around (jasomi, for example)? or
are the far-end things just hyped up media proxies? They claim to be
b2bua devices but that's a very wide category and only implies that
the media stream passes through it -  exactly what can be done with
fairly simple OSS stuff.

In short, what advantage does such a setup have over, for example, an
all-IAX setup, or STUN, or a setup with SER/mediaproxy as a SIP server
and asterisk behind it?

thanks,
 yair