asterisk users - Aug 2005 - Generic Question: Why should I use Asterisk over SIPxchange?

For those of you who have been working with asterisk for a while and
who have experience with SIPxchange, why have you chosen Asterisk over
the latter?

What are some significant differences between the two that those of
you familiar with both have discovered?

Brent

On Wed, 3 Aug 2005 08:15:29 -0500, brent clements wrote:
>For those of you who have been working with asterisk for a while and
>who have experience with SIPxchange, why have you chosen Asterisk over
>the latter?
>
>What are some significant differences between the two that those of
>you familiar with both have discovered?
>
>Brent
Well, to start with SIPxchange was still a commercial product 18 months
ago when I started to experiment with *.

Nextly, SIPxchange is pure SIP. Asterisk is configurable for SIP, IAX2,
TDM, TDMoE, etc. Pure SIP may work for some people, but as long as you
have to talk to the local PSTN you're likely to need some TDM hardware.
Outboard SIP <> FXO and SIP<>PRI interfaces exist but my experience
with small ones (Sipura SPA-3000) was not good.

Also, NAT traversal with SIP is a pain. By sticking with IAX2 to ITSPs
I have avoided a huge PITA.

Finally, Astlinux is such a usefull and reliable thing. My * server
boots from CF and stores configs and VM on a USB key. While it's on a
UPS if it goes down for some reason it boots up to fully functional in
about a minute. It's totally silent, fanless and just plain cool. One
box. This serves my small office well.

There are likely some who need the scalability that SIPxchange
theoretically provides. But then again, SER has been around a lot
longer and witha larger installed base. If I were looking at a pure SIP
situation I'd probably consider SER over SIPxchange. It'd be very
interesting to see a comparision of SER vs SIPxchange.

Michael

--
Michael Graves                           mgraves@pixelpower.com
Sr. Product Specialist                          www.pixelpower.com
Pixel Power Inc.                                 mgraves@mstvp.com

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