Asterisk is the most popular open source PBX. There must be
millions of Asterisk-based installations out there. When comparing Asterisk
with other PBX from Cisco, Avaya, Mitel, or others, the thing that is most
obvious to me is it level of interoperability that invited and still invites
many manufacturers of devices and software to integrate with Asterisk. This is
the counterpart of the closed system where the warranty ends if you bring your
own device.
We see that many of the snom m9 devices are used in
environments that use some kind of Asterisk. While snom has its own PBX snom
ONE, snom devices are still highly interoperable with all kinds of PBX in the
market. It makes a lot of sense for snom to make the interoperability with
Asterisk as smooth as possible.
The m9 has a slightly different concept than the desktop
phones: Instead of having a seemingly millions of different configuration options,
it has one drop-down per identity that determined the interoperability mode
with the used registrar. Instead of having to figure out how to set each option
right for your installation, the m9 comes with a pre-programmed list of
servers. When selecting Asterisk, a few things like ICE and presence
publication are automatically disabled. So just select the right dropdown and you should be all set picking the right settings for Asterisk.
We even brainstormed what we
can do to improve the interoperability with Asterisk, but not much came to our
mind. Newer versions of Asterisk support TLS and SRTP; on the forums we saw
some hiccups with long TCP packets that seem to be fixed with the latest
Asterisk version. On the m9 side, it seems there is nothing else that we can do
to make this work better.
One interesting development where the Asterisk and snom m9 combination
could become interesting is IPv6. Both Asterisk and the snom m9 are on the
leading edge when it comes to IPv6. I personally know about an Asterisk snom m9
IPv6 deployment; it seems that this is working well.
When it comes to Asterisk interoperability, it seems that
the m9 is in a good shape and we are running out of ideas what to do next. Improvements are more of a general nature that
applies to all PBX systems. If anybody has an idea how the Asterisk integration
can be improved, it would be interesting to get that feedback.
I'm not fond of this drop-down based configuration: some things that are not supported by Asterisk might be in the future, when the m9 is not being developed anymore, and their users will be in the limbo, just like with the m3 right now.
ReplyDeleteThat's actually a valid point. Asterisk is also quite a broad term, there are hundreds if not thousands of different versions in the field. Having a simple dropdown is a tradeoff between simple configuration and avoiding that customers overlook important settings and loosing the flexibility to iron out incompatibilities. However one important difference between the m3 and the m9 is that snom has control over the code in the m9. So if Asterisk should have versions that change too much to keep just one simple dropdown, it can be changed in future versions.
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