Reza - Asterisk Enthusiast wrote:
This is more of a political/economical question.
Yes, it is; more political than economic :-)
The problem I am facing is that a number of carriers I am potentially
signing up with and doing testing, allow g729 only as they have
proprietary switch (hardware and software) for which they have made a
considerable financial investment.
Though I do not mind spending the money for about 30 - 50 licenses for
concurrent calls --- I want to hear from you folks, whether g729 is
worth the bang for the buck.
I want to hear from you :-) whether you think open unencumbered
technologies are worth striving for. If you do, then you will find a way
to use them without spending money to keep encumbered technologies going.
Think about this: RIM paid $600 million or so to encumbrance specialists
NTP, who do not own so much as one transistor nor line of code of their
own technology, they just hold patents. A few weeks later, RIM was sued
again by another company, one that is partly held by (guess who) NTP.
Paying any money to encumbrances just fosters them and makes it harder
for unencumbered good stuff to thrive.
Or in quainter terms, not politically correct but straight out of
English history, once you pay the Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane.
So! The $300-$500 dollar question:
Would you avoid g729 if you could?
If so why?
Yes, see above.
Are there TRULY FREE implementations of g729?
(I could not find any for Asterisk)
No, it is the algorithm that is encumbered, not the implementation.
AFAIK you cannot (legally) make a free implementation of G729. If you
doubt this, go and pay your $80 to download the encumbered specification
from the ITU - but be careful what you agree to in the process :-(
Ian
