On Wed, 2006-06-14 at 13:20 -0400, Reza - Asterisk Enthusiast wrote: > The Question: > Who's next? Who dare trash Asterisk?
Heh.. ok, I'll take the bait and try and balance this discussion a little bit. One thing that I think a lot of coders would agree with is that that the Asterisk code base is not pretty. Asterisk started out as a hack and from what I've seen has continued on this way for a very long time never really getting any better. If you've ever opened up the code you'd be luck to find one comment every 100 lines of code. Its very hard to contribute to Asterisk because there is zero documentation for developers and the code is not well commented. Another thing that I think most people would have trouble refuting is the fact that a software-emulated PRI interface is not as good as a "true" hardware one. Its similar to the difference between a hardware modem and a "Win-modem". Sure they work; but its just not the same. But, I'm sure many people said Win-Modems are an "infantile toy", but good luck finding a hardware modem these days. Sometimes price is enough of an incentive to give up a "better" technology. BTW, my understanding is Sangoma cards are a bit more of a hybrid. They do HLDC timing in hardware and therefore put less load on the server and are more reliable for timing etc but I'm certainly not an authority on this. Asterisk is also still lacking some features that are consider standard on most PBXs. 1) Faxing (T38 support is due in 1.4). 2) Proper line presence display (this is starting to work now but is barely supported.) 3) Multi-cast paging (the current method of pulling everyone into a conference room for a page is a hack) 4) No jitter buffer. How can you have a VoIP system without jitter buffering? (a jitter buffer is also due for 1.4) (yes I know there is already jitter in IAX) That being said, ALL PBXs have their limitations and at least with Asterisk you know when a feature gets added you won't have to spend thousands to do an upgrade. Its pretty clear that software based phone systems based on open standards are the way of the future. John
