Hello Ian! You know I agree with all that you are saying. The issues I have faced, as you have pointed out -- does not exist if two clients have g729 enabled. However I needed some protection from the Danes so I had to pay the tax ;)
The g729 truly does not require a license strictly in pass-through mode... that is... Asterisk is merely acting as the bridge between two g729 based clients. There is no transcoding at that moment. This is true. Unfortunately the situation I am cornered into - is terminating to overseas destinations. MOST of the telcos overseas... at least all the several dozen engineers I spoke with unfortunately, do not know "Asterisk" and its benefits. They are not governed, nor those countries enforce piracy etc... so they are not as enthusiastic as we are here in this part of the world, about Open Source. However those telco engineers - have been BRAIN WASHED by proprietary hardware manufacturers. Sweet deals, free flights, conferences, sponsorships etc... have made some of those telcos PRO Cisco... plus those telco engineers do not care because the money for the telco implementation is actually government funded. So coming back to getting cornered - a LOT of my SIP user base does not have G729 in their phones. Few of my carriers who exclusively provide me US DIDs are pro-Asterisk based and do not terminate my inbound US calls to G729. Adds to this another technical complication is that I cannot simply "pass-thru", because I am running calling card apps. So if the calls are being originated in G729 from one of the DIDs, my * has to be able to talk G729. One more complication ... and this is political -- the TOS of one of my Tier 1 carrier is to use G729. But I really do hope and anticipate that all this will change, in the near future and we will have MORE choices than G729 between carrier interconnectivity. Asterisk is changing the way Telecoms are doing business. I think MORE of us using Asterisk will eventually harbour open source codecs and O.S.Codecs will become widely accepted in the industry. All it will take is just ONE major telco to start using O.S.Codecs and the rest will follow. Now that's my 2 cents :). Cheers! ----- Original Message ----- From: Ian Service To: Reza - Asterisk Enthusiast Cc: TAUG Sent: Tuesday, May 09, 2006 8:51 PM Subject: Re: [on-asterisk] Your opinion on G729 I have found that the g729 implementation on asterisk isn't as fantastic as I would have hoped. It works, it saves you bandwidth, but I find that if you're talking to your asterisk box or transcoding the call quality doesn't compare to talking between two quality g729 enabled devices. If asterisk doesn't put its foot in the door, the quality of the call is better overall. That's the main result I got from my testing, but I wasn't using Zap hardware so maybe if you're using a PRI card, you'll have different results. Another thing to note, if you're making a call through an asterisk box, once the call has gone through, your license won't be occupied, so if you're dealing with routing between endpoints, you technically shouldn't be using up any licenses for those calls. Some of my testing ended up picking the wrong codec for whatever reason so my box was transcoding and having the license made that work as opposed to not. - Ian
