On Wednesday, May 11, 2011 07:49:12 AM Alan Cox wrote:
It's not really down to "FOSS alternatives". There are
*standards* for
voice over IP.
And thanks to NAT-hatred in the standards process, most of those require finagling
firewall forwarding fritters..er... rules; H.323 for instance seems to be designed from
the ground up specifically to break NAT, and requires some major work at the NAT box to
make work properly. SIP and others as well.
So supporting VoIP from behind a typical residential NAT box isn't as straightforward
as it could be; behind a Cisco or a well-configured Linux NAT box it's not hard.
Skype's big selling point is that it works just fine through NAT, even if the NAT is
on both ends (NAT444), or on both ends and in the middle (NAT4444, CGN, etc)....and no
special port-forwards or other applications-level gatewaying or any of those other tricks
the *standard* VoIP protocols seem to require for no good reason....other than to break
NAT.... :-)
Sorry, pet peeve there.