VoicePulse hangs up IAX support

The VoIP provider VoicePulse is a favorite of mine. In addition to consumer voip offerings, they provide services for businesses and individuals that use their own PBX systems. And it’s these users that are impacted by the changes VoicePulse is making this week. I’ve used them for years, and they’ve provided rock solid service on my PBX’s from the Asterisk@Home days to now with PBXinaFlash. While their inbound plans weren’t the cheapest, they offered great outbound rates and are certainly among the very best at delivering reliable voip services with top notch support. They know how to run a voip business. For forever, or at least a very long time, they offered trunking support for both SIP & IAX protocols. Until now that is. This week, VoicePulse has begun their big server migration which will bring their long support of IAX to a close. I can’t say no one saw this coming. To be fair, every user was informed of this eventuality well in advance.

For those that don’t know, IAX is short for Inter-Asterisk eXchange. A protocol developed by Mark Spencer the creator of Asterisk. Well in it’s second version (IAX2), it uses a single UDP stream to setup/teardown calls and carry the media (voice and/or video). It’s very efficient at doing what it does, and slips through NAT and firewalls with relative ease, eliminating much of the initial setup headaches causing one-way or no audio, as well as the DTMF issues that crop up using SIP. None of those issues are insurmountable though, and I’d still be using SIP with VoicePulse otherwise. For me, the biggest issue by far is an apparent Asterisk bug that just refuses to die. On Asterisk systems with SIP trunks, losing the internet means losing everything. Internal extensions will unregister and any backup POTS lines will become unreachable. This has been an issue for years, and the sole reason for me to decide to standardize on IAX. And I’m not alone, I believe a growing number of other Asterisk or Asterisk derived users are going IAX only too. IAX for many, just works. So for now, and I hope temporarily, VoicePulse and I have parted company.

There are still a handful of providers out there that still support IAX. Teliax and Voip.ms, are two. Vitelity lets you use IAX, but has dropped support for it and no longer posts configuration examples. Fonica is a fairly new service from Spain that is IAX only. Joe Roper debuted Fonica to the PBXinaFlash forum users about six months ago. Current users are giving them positive feedback, and I’m currently giving them a go. I’ll post my experiences with various providers in a future article.