Jan et all, I have been succesfully using used GNUGK for over 4 years now in a few different setups - as proxy, gatekeeper and even as SBC. For over 1.5 years I've been working as a voice engineer and then as voice Ops manager for the largest data network provider in Europe and we used Nextone MSW as SBCs. We used to do over 200 mil minutes/month, with peaks of over 10.000 simultaneous voip calls (sip and h.323) and I can make a comparison between the two. Nextone MSW is probably the world's leading SBC manufacturer and is very popular in the carrier's world. It can do SIP and H.323, we had most of the traffic as SIP, but also a lot of h.323 traffic (about 70-30 distribution). In terms of bugs I can say the nextone MSW was not great when working with h.323 at all. However, performance-wise I don't really have comparison terms between the 2, mainly because of the architectures of the 2 products. Nextone uses specialized hardware (hotknife cards) to handle RTP. This increases the performance of the system a lot and I think the gnugk project should consider this at one point if the need or opportunity to go carrier-grade is seen. The architecture of the Nextone MSW was optimized for carrier grade usage with trunk group routing and billing which is a big plus imo. However, as I said, Nextone is still not great handling h.323, I've sent them a list of bugs (some of them solved in a newer version, some of them not) which were frustrating. Gnugk is far more flexible than any commercial product for a simple reason - it's open source. I've been modifying some stuff in gnugk for billing purposes and it works great (+ I've never had a problem with gnugk billing). I'm not sure gnugk was ever thought of as beeing carrier grade. If it was, then the "carrier grade" term needs to be defined because doing voip termination doesn't make you a carrier. What carriers are looking at is : - High volume of calls (by high I mean over 2000 simultaneous calls which gnugk can't do). With GNUGK in routed mode I was doing around 300 or a bit more. - High CAPS value. The Nextone MSW can do around 100 CAPS working with sip and h.323 (if I remember correctly ~80 CAPS in h.323 only). I have no idea how many CAPS gnugk can handle, I remember 2 years ago gnugk had a lot of problems handling a lot of call attempts per second and versuch (which is another great open source software) used to do it better but it was more buggy. - Vendor Support - In a carrier organization, the vendor is the 3rd or 4th line of support. A carrier needs to know if something fails they can call the vendor and get the vendor support online in a matter of minutes. You won't believe the monthly charges vendors have for support, depending on SLA. At a first sight it may be unjustified, but for huge traffic it can actually save you money even if you're paying your vendors 6 digits amounts/year. - Stability - An open source solution that has been tested and it's stable doesn't mean it will stay this way. As an example, a couple of years ago I was running gnugk as proxy with over 50 subscribers for months when it started to crash regularry from a RAI message sent by a cisco ATA. There was some revenue loss until I found and fixed the problem, but I'm not sure how many would have been able to do that, therefore the vendor support is highly appreciated in these cases. - 3rd party liability - By agreeing with some SLAs, commercial voip solution vendors take upon them losses generated by software/hardware failure. - market credibility - would big carriers interconnect to your open-source solution ? ...and the list can continue. Bottom line, there's no point of comparing gnugk with any commercial carrier-grade sbc. More than that, gnugk was probably not built as SBC even if it can work as one. Considering GNUGK a company proxy would be an insult to the project, it is much more than that. Gnugk is a great product - it can be used in many different setups creating many applications, I would say for start-ups or small businesses. LONG LIVE OPEN SOURCE ! Also, Simon's PacPhone is a fantastic product and it works with GNUGK perfectly. All it needs is better graphics which is probably why there are more users implementing (* and X-lite) than (Gnugk and PacPhone). What Jan should be looking at is drawing more financial support towards Gnugk to make it more popular and develop more features. Anyway, keep it up guys ! You have all my support, don't hesitate to ask if you need anything. Cheers, Lucian -----Original Message----- From: openh323gk-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:openh323gk-users-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Jan Willamowius Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 3:23 AM To: openh323gk-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: GnuGK vs MERA MVTS Hi Jan, thanks for listing the results of your comparison, but I'd like to note a few things that have changed: GnuGk has call failover since version 2.2.4 and since 2.2.3, you can use [FileIPAuth] to authenticate by IP number. I also see installations having 400-500 proxy calls on a regular Linux server and even more in routed mode. But beyond that, most users cluster servers, indeed. But GnuGk isn't perfect and maybe a few others on the list could share their experience comparing GnuGk to other commercial systems. Regards, Jan Jan Riedinger wrote: > Hello Jove, > > I evaluated gnugk two years ago. Thus, maybe my statements are not up to > date. And maybe I'm biased, because I have Mera Reseller agreement. > > However, two years ago gnugk was not carrier grade: > > I had performance problems, with mvts 1 you can handle more than 1000 - > 2000 with a standard PC. With gnugk I was able to handle under > FreeBSD with a two processor system at maximum 130 simultanous calls. > But I heard with Linux more than 300 were possible. > > gnugk had had no 2cd choice routing. If the first routing choice signals > "no circuit" there was no chance to reroute the call to a 2cd choice. > > It was decided by random, when the call duration in the CDRs were > rounded up and rounded down to the next integer number. > > It was not possible to restrict calls by using ip adresses. This was > indirectly possible anyway by using aliases (I dont remember exactly), > but you had the precondition that your customer didn't change the name > of his GW. This was a no go for me, because I couldnt make my routing > dependend on the configuration of my customer. > > Mera can do transcoding (e.g from g723 to g729). There are a lot of > option for call distribution if you have more than one supplier. > > I'm a fan of free software, but if you want to use gnugk as carrier with > a lot of E1 call capacity I dont think that gnugk is (at least was) a > good option. If you want to use it for a company proxy it is probably > good enough. > > However, there is strong trend for using SIP. Thus I'm currently > evaluating to use SER and maybe Asterisk or a Cisco for transcoding to > reduce licence fees. > > BR > Jan Riedinger > > > > > > Jove Blazevski schrieb: > > Hello, > > > > Can anybody please give some comparison between GnuGK and MERA Softswich > > (MVTS or MVTS II). Only for the h.323 part, MVTS supports SIP but that is > > not important in this case. > > > > I would really like to know how GNUGK stands with MVTS with high volume of > > calls. In addition, is MERA compatible with many h.323 devices like GnuGK > > is? > > > > Thank you very much. > > Jove -- Jan Willamowius, jan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.gnugk.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace _______________________________________________________ Posting: mailto:Openh323gk-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Archive: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=openh323gk-users Unsubscribe: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openh323gk-users Homepage: http://www.gnugk.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;164216239;13503038;w?http://sf.net/marketplace _______________________________________________________ Posting: mailto:Openh323gk-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Archive: http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?forum_name=openh323gk-users Unsubscribe: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/openh323gk-users Homepage: http://www.gnugk.org/
