[bbs-revival] FOSS Softmodems with Asterisk integration

This is merely a historical archive of years 2008-2021, before the migration to mailman3.

A maintained and still updated list archive can be found at https://lists.osmocom.org/hyperkitty/list/bbs-revival@lists.osmocom.org/.

Christian Berger christian at clarke-3.de
Sat Feb 17 14:16:38 UTC 2018


Servus,

There are actually multiple FOSS Softmodems.
This one, for example, is based on spandsp:
https://github.com/proquar/asterisk-Softmodem

This one was written by myself and handles the data-link protocoll of 
BTX for error-free communications:
https://github.com/Casandro/btx_modem
It's also just 527 lines of code with the only external dependency being 
Asterisk.

Then there's also IAXModem, but that's mainly aimed at Faxes.

There's actually a big advantage of using software based modems over 
hardware based ones. With IP-Telephony it is vital to have proper 
clocks. Unfortunately many bad ATAs have really bad clocks. So your 
sender might send out its voice with 8010 Hz sampling rate, while the 
receiver might run at 7090 Hz That means that eventually you will have 
buffers running over and samples being thrown away. This is very bad for 
modems and one of the reasons why T.38 was invented. However with a 
software based modem you can just send a packet of data for every packet 
you get, so essentially, if it isn't converted to TDM in the middle, 
you'll adapt to the speed of the ATA.
(The obvious sane solution to that would of course be to simply use NTP 
to determine the frequency error of your system and then adjust your 
sample rate so it'll be precisely 8kHz on average. However sane people 
usually don't work in that field because of SIP)

Servus
   Christian



More information about the bbs-revival mailing list