Asterisk 11 And H.323 Trunk Using OOH323 – Is It Stable?

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Asterisk Users 7 Comments

Dear List,

I’m about to build an Asterisk 11.7 based PBX from scratch for our company. I’m in the middle of the planning phase and it turned out that our VoIP
provider prefers H.323 protocol for handling voice calls (while SIP is also supported as “plan B”).

As I never worked with H.323 channels in Asterisk earlier, I’m not sure if it’s stable enough to be used in production.

Googling about the subject didn’t help much, I could only find some old and probably outdated information which I don’t want to rely on.

Can you please confirm if the OOH323 module in Asterisk 11 is stable enough to use for voice calls? No extra functionality is needed, just to be able to create a H.323 trunk towards the provider and make and receive a maximum of 30 simultaneous voice calls through the trunk.

Thanks for your kind response!

Regards, Gergely Kiss

7 thoughts on - Asterisk 11 And H.323 Trunk Using OOH323 – Is It Stable?

  • Save yourself time / energy and insist using SIP. If your ITSP cannot accommodate your request, thank them and look for another provider.

    H323 is Asterisk is basically dead, sure there is a module, sure it might compile, but you’ll be going down the path of zero help.

  • It’s SIP everywhere and anyone who requires you, in 2014, to use H.323
    should get a clue. Avoid them or at least demand SIP.

    No idea. Maybe someone else with H.323 experience will respond. AFAIK
    it’s a dead-end.

    Regards, Patrick

  • Patrick Lists wrote:

    Bah. There is nothing wrong with a working H.323 stack. Just assuming that they will have a working SIP stack because of the date can lead to heartache.

    The ooh323 channel has been fairly reliable in our use case, which involve connecting to a commercial IP PBX with crud SIP support. Only you can tell if it will work for you however, as sadly many times new core features only get tested against the SIP channel(s), or worse only implemented there as well. Our current Asterisk version is 11.5.1

    Dan

  • Sorry, have nothing to say of 11.5 but OOH323 works great in 1.8. I use it as an Avaya IP Office trunk. No problems.

    As you observed for yourself when you researched the topic there is not a lot of help available, and Asterisk team prefers to make everybody think that SIP is the only viable call setup protocol around. They kind of not talking a lot about their own IAX any more.

    The official H.323 is abandoned. OOH323 is being supported by a very capable and responsive guy. He does not frequent the user list as he subscribes to the developer list, so I normally transfer the help inquiries to him if there is no traction here.

    -Vladimir

  • By itself there is nothing wrong with a working H.323 stack. I just would not use it 🙂 Using H.323 for one provider while any backup or alternative providers probably use SIP results in needing two stacks in testing & production. It also requires the admins to gain knowledge of a legacy protocol. Maybe there are some incumbents or service providers with legacy H.323 equipment continuing to offer H.323 service. I get that. But for a business building a VoIP PBX from scratch H.323 does not make sense from a cost and operations point of view.

    The OP mentioned that his VoIP provider prefers H.323 so it seems to be about trunking. IMHO “fairly reliable” is not something that is acceptable for trunking phone service.

    H.323 is what Gopher is to HTTP/webservers. When was the last time you used a Gopher service? Would you today still buy Gopher based service because the service provider prefers it? 🙂

    Regards, Patrick

  • Thank you all for your reply!

    I think I’m going to give OOH323 a try. In case I see any functional issues or instability, I’ll switch to SIP without spending too much time with debugging.

    Regards, Gergely