After many years of hard work the Inter Asterisk eXchange protocol version 2 (IAX2) has been published under the auspices of the IETF as RFC 5456. Note that the editor uses the second sentence to clearly define this document: "It does not specify an Internet standard of any kind." Then again, it took the SIP RFC a long time to get to the standards track as well.

So what does this all mean? More than anything this gives us users of the IAX2 protocol a reference document to use when trouble-shooting, sizing and otherwise working with VoIP infrastructure that uses IAX2 to transport call control and voice data streams. And perhaps, after absorbing this document, the peculiarities of the various asterisk configuration file settings will finally make more sense!