kpfleming September 5th, 2008

For the past couple of years, we’ve had ever-increasing demand for MFC/R2 support in Asterisk, as Asterisk is being used in many parts of the world that do not enjoy the wonders of ISDN PRI signaling on their E1 links. For a time, there was a method used by many users of Asterisk based on Steve Underwood’s ‘Unicall’ library and his chan_unicall channel driver for Asterisk, but as Steve’s interests moved on to other projects he ceased maintaining and improving that channel driver. Some members of the community attempted to pick it up and keep it current, but that hasn’t provided the simple solution that many users are looking for.

At Digium, we’ve even contemplated licensing a commercial MFC/R2 stack and making it available to our users, just so that Asterisk can be easily used in as many places and applications as people want to use it. However, earlier this year, a young man in Mexico decided he had enough of this situation, and that he was going to write an MFC/R2 stack from scratch, integrate it into Asterisk, and provide the result back to the Asterisk community. He met with Mark Spencer at an event, chatted with him, got Mark excited about the project, and Mark came back to Huntsville fired up enough to write some additional code in Asterisk and Zaptel that was needed for this new stack to do its work. That man’s name is Moises Silva (moy, in the Asterisk development community) and his project has taken on a life of its own now. He has his OpenR2 stack working with all major versions of open-source Asterisk, and it is being used in countries around the world, and gaining support for additional countries as developers in those countries find out about it and add the needed enhancements for their country’s particular flavor of R2.

This, in a nutshell, is the beauty of open source development. Someone with the skills and desire to build something decides to do it, and because they make it open source, it has the chance to gain a development and user community that organically ‘grow’ the project to fill as many gaps as it can. I for one will be looking forward to Moy’s presentation at this year’s Astricon about his OpenR2 and Asterisk work!

Moises Silva

OpenR2 in Asterisk – MFC/R2 Free of Headaches or Your Money Back

Moises Silva works as a Software Engineer for IBM México. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communications from the Universidad de Guadalajara. In his spare time he has been the maintainer of the chan_unicall driver for Asterisk 1.4 and is the author of the MFC/R2 signaling library OpenR2. He is currently pushing to support MFC/R2 signaling in chan_zap. He also has made several contributions to Asterisk like Asynchronous AGI and context tracing for channels.

For the past years, MFC/R2 signaling has been a PITA for most Asterisk system administrators in all parts of the world, specially Brasil, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia. Unicall and libmfcr2 are quite good implementations but for several reasons not an out-of-the-box solution for MFC/R2 users. During this session we will cover this reasons and more importantly how OpenR2 is being implemented in chan_zap to address those problems in the hope that will be finally a well supported built-in Asterisk solution for this signaling.

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