The GNU Bayonne 2 Telephony Application Server

The GNU Bayonne 2 Telephony Application Server

Posted Nov 3, 2005 21:02 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)
In reply to: The GNU Bayonne 2 Telephony Application Server by ncm
Parent article: The GNU Bayonne 2 Telephony Application Server

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.

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