The GNU Bayonne 2 Telephony Application Server

Posted Nov 3, 2005 13:29 UTC (Thu) by evgeny (subscriber, #774) [Link]

I'd like to know, too. Time for the new grumpy editor article? ;-)

Posted Nov 3, 2005 16:52 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

Asterisk in my experience seems to be stable, but having worked with the
actual source code, it's a freaking mess in some major ways. For example,
there are a lot of various functions you can apply in the dialplan to
control a call in the middle of it, and *each one* implements its own
argument string tokenizer. (Props to the Asterisk developers on IAX,
though... it's one of the few sane protocols I've seen developed in a
while).

Of course, being an engineer in the VoIP industry, I'm not convinced that
anyone here knows anything about code quality, or even cares for that
matter. SIP is an HTTP-like protocol, though typically it uses UDP as a
transport mechanism. It seems that all the proprietary software vendors
in this industry like to charge absyminally hideous rates for
PBXs/software that never seems to be capable of more than 20 calls per
second on powerful hardware (powerful meaning that Apache, which must do
HTTP over TCP, can achieve 1500 requests/sec) [asterisk, despite its
limitations, does remarkably better].

In any case, open source's presence in VoIP is just now taking off, and
I'm expecting to see a lot of these proprietary software vendors get
absolutely flattened in the next 5-10 years. I was pretty impressed by
one thing at this year's Fall VON 2005 - Digium (makers of Asterisk) had
the largest booth with a lot of partners present, and they had constant
traffic.

I have yet to use Bayonne, but competition in open source is good.
Everyone's quality will go up.

Posted Nov 3, 2005 21:02 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

The single biggest different is voice processing.

Bayonne supports Dialogic and Aculab cards that offload all the voice processing onto a seperate cards. You know those really expensive telephony cards?

OTOH, Asterisk works on the mantra of "everything on the CPU" so the E1/T1 cards it supports are basically interfacing the E1/T1 channel to your PCI bus and let the CPU handle the rest.

That's why Bayonne has "beginning VoIP support" because that requires getting the voice off the card and many hardware telephony cards don't support that.

So it's a different market: Bayonne is aimed at people who have the hardware. In theory Bayonne could support any number of channels with hardware support and sit in the middle controlling it all. Asterisk on the other hand would require all the voice traffic to cross the PCI to main memory and back.

Not entirely true ofcourse, because recent versions of Asterisk allow you to bridge calls on the card, instead of everything on the bus. But that won't work for a conference call for example. Hardware telephony cards have conferencing builtin, simply trunk the channels through to the co-processor and send the result back out the other channels. If you have 4 PCI telephony cards you can join them into a single bus and they can share resources.

I hope I've cleared this up for people. If you do a Grumpy Editor article you'll probably find that Bayonne's VoIP support is less. But that will be the only part you can test because you don't have the thousands to spend on a hardware card.