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VOCAL: Open Source VoIP Software for Linux

Posted by timothy on from the taunting-the-phone-company-dragon dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "While most Open Source projects are applications and utilities intended for single users, David Bryan and David Kelly did something different. They created an infrastructure project -- a VoIP phone system that either can run on a single box attached to a couple of IP phones or can scale up to a network of hosts processing hundreds of calls between thousands of users. In this informative technical article at ELJonline, Bryan and Kelly detail the 'Vovida Open Communications Applications Library' ('VOCAL') project, a fully functional phone system that can run on either Red Hat Linux or Sun Solaris."

2 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. Very Interesting by SpasticChicken · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Seeing as how my company is one of the telecom's that is failing right now, maybe we could use this technology to replace our Sonus Softswitchs. I bet that would save us a whole lot of green. I'm going to have to check it out and see what I can set up.

  2. These protocols are all wrong by thogard · · Score: 2, Insightful

    At work I've got a cyclades PR4000 hooked up to a E1 (30 line pri isdn link) and the device is a router. The device can take an ISDN call and hand the data off to a port on anything connected to the net but it can't (or won't) do it if its a voice call because it hands it off to an overpriced DPS module that wants to decode the signals as if they were from a modem. With the
    exception of a packet saying "this call came in on port 12 for phone no 99991111 from 1233212232" its got all the bits together to pull this off but no such luck. The people from cyclades said they looked at doing VoIP but everyone wanted "standards" which they didn't or couldn't squeeze into the RAS box. I don't think they ever thought that it wasn't that hard.

    Now if I could tell this box, "take calles on this line and send them to port 5433 on 192.168.1.23 as a 64k mu-law stream" then I would have 99% of what I need for a VoIP gateway to the telephone company.

    I also have another toy which is a 3com NBX 100 "IP Phone System". Too bad its an ethernet phone system and not an IP phone system. They claim its "open" but the only thing I've found out about it is they have illegal included gzip and gnu tar in an executable which they aren't providing source for. This from one of the few IT compaines that supported the DMCA. Maybe they had stuff to hide like stealing software. Google for "NBX rant" for more...

    </rant off>

    So I've got this cool device hooked to the phone co and I've got another cool device that hooks to cool phones that sit on my desk and talk over the lan. Will they every talk to each other? I think not.

    The next great leap in VoIT will come from someone thats got the balls to do ISDN over IP and write some sample code that works and then an RFC. Till then its just a sick game.