Asterisk Breeds A Cottage Industry 155
gardel writes "The open-source PBX is popular, powerful and affordable. But setting up and maintaining Asterisk in its distributed form is a technical challenge for even the most accomplished of geeks. Now, Voxilla reports, several new companies (more than 60, at last count), smelling a good business opportunity, offer simplified graphical front-ends for Asterisk. And more are on the way."
Re:cool (Score:5, Informative)
You can do everything with it, but configuration is a lot of text files in true unix fashion.. it's more of a framework than a completed solution... which is what the article is about.. asterisk is really powerful, but setting up a complicated setup is sort of, well, complicated (though I find the complexity is about right for the level of flexibility)
Re:cool (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, IP phones with quality full-duplex speakerphone support (unlike the otherwise excellent Sipura SPA-841s we're using) are *expensive*. (Know of a sub-$200 SIP phone with good speakerphone support? Let me know!)
Asterisk is many things, but not without hardware (Score:5, Informative)
Re:This is cool... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This is cool... (Score:3, Informative)
The only thing to remember is that the Meridian phones are proprietary crap. So you can't just plug them into asterisk, but rather you'll have to
plug your asterisk server between the phone lines that come from the phone company and your PBX.
Then, expand your system by either buying some Sipura 2000 boxes and regular telephones, or some IP phones.
I challenge the technically challenged assertion. (Score:1, Informative)
Re:This is cool... (Score:2, Informative)
It also allows me to have extensions that route to my sales person's phones at THEIR home. Our clients don't know any different and people get to work from home. There are a lot of features I don't use, but it saves us about $400/month on long distance calls and adding additional lines can be done my IT staff rather than an Avaya tech.
The immature part of the asterisk technology is not asterisk itself, but the VOIP providers that work with asterisk. I have yet to find a reliable VOIP provider that can work with asterisk, I've tried LiveVOIP (horrible horrible service), Teliax, iax.cc, voicepulse, broadvoice, and SIPPhone. If someone can become a reliable VOIP provider that works ALL the time with asterisk, they can make a ton of money. We have to use analog lines for our incoming and outgoing lines because the VOIP providers are not caught up the reliability of asterisk.
The article fails to link to.... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm doing the Documentation for AMP [coalescentsystems.ca] which is probably (IMO) the best admin tool, and it's what is used for 99% of the administration of Asterisk@Home [sourceforge.net]. AMP is rapidly becoming more than just a basic interface to Asterisk tho - the current CVS handles LCR, ZAP Trunks (eg, physical connections to the PSTN via ISDN or normal 2-wire FXO/FXS), Call Groups, Inbound call queues with everything you'd expect ("Your call is 4th in the queue. Your expected wait time is 3 minutes"). The current CVS of Asterisk, when used with AMP, gives you attended transfers, call (audio) recording, and a whole pile of other stuff.
Probably the best thing for someone new to VoIP is to get the latest version of Asterisk@Home (which is 0.9 at the time of this post) and an old machine, a couple of soft-phones (VoIP software that lets you make calls from your PC using your sound card) and a FWD [fwdnet.net] number and start playing.
Feel free to leave me voicemail on my FWD number - 47876 - if you have any questions or comments!
--RobRe:The article fails to link to.... (Score:1, Informative)
Corrected links... (Score:3, Informative)
I'm doing the Documentation for AMP [coalescentsystems.ca] which is probably (IMO) the best admin tool, and it's what is used for 99% of the administration of Asterisk@Home [sourceforge.net]. AMP is rapidly becoming more than just a basic interface to Asterisk tho - the current CVS handles LCR, ZAP Trunks (eg, physical connections to the PSTN via ISDN or normal 2-wire FXO/FXS), Call Groups, Inbound call queues with everything you'd expect ("Your call is 4th in the queue. Your expected wait time is 3 minutes"). The current CVS of Asterisk, when used with AMP, gives you attended transfers, call (audio) recording, and a whole pile of other stuff.
Probably the best thing for someone new to VoIP is to get the latest version of Asterisk@Home (which is 0.9 at the time of this post) and an old machine, a couple of soft-phones (VoIP software that lets you make calls from your PC using your sound card) and a FWD [fwdnet.net] number and start playing.
Feel free to leave me voicemail on my FWD number - 47876 - if you have any questions or comments!
--RobCrap. Wrong link (Score:3, Informative)
However, voip-info has been having significant performance issues, so I think that *not* linking to it was a good idea. It looks like it's been slashdotted just by having the VoIP meme high in the geek global awareness.
--Rob
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:This is cool... (Score:2, Informative)
No, to connect to regular phones ("stations") you use FXS ("foreign exchange station") ports. FXO ("foreign exchange office") ports are for connecting to the phone company CO ("central office").
VoIP eliminates hardware need, FXO cheap anyway (Score:1, Informative)
For the stations, you either need an FXS card (about $100 per extension) or an IP phone (about $70 per phone) or a headset and software phone (about $10 per extension). Since most people aren't satisfied with the pure software phones, it's the hardware cost per extension that matters.
The Asterisk computer itself usually costs from $100 to $200; for "real" use you want a battery backup, and that's included in that estimate, as well as one FXO (outgoing) card. Then the best solution is IP phones for the stations, at whatever the cheapest you can get on ebay. You can get them for $40 sometimes, but usually it will be more.
Re:Will it take off? (Score:4, Informative)
Purely because the Telephone System is the communications hub of most businesses. It's the one thing you don't expect to go down - so reliability is critical.
Do you have some inside knowledge that indicates that Asterisk is unreliable? I hadn't heard that.
There's no vendor backup, etc - same with most Open Source software, and while that wouldn't be an issue with most other applications - PBX's are a different kettle of fish.
I don't know what you mean by "vendor backup". If you buy a Asterisk-based solution then it is backed by your solution provider. They have access to the source code in the same way that a proprietary software vendor has access to the source code. On the other hand, unlike the situation with a proprietary software vendor, there is competition between solution providers with equal access to the source code.
It's the one thing you don't expect to go down - so reliability is critical.
Google.com and Amazon.com are both based in large part on open source software. Would you say that reliability is not "critical" for their websites?
I'm by no means an open source zealot (I write proprietary software) but I can't let illogic just pass by. There is some highly reliable open source software and some highly reliable proprietary software. And there is some crappy open source and proprietary software out there.
Asterisk lets you be really creative. (Score:3, Informative)
The possibilities are huge.
I've just started cataloguing [fastriver.com] some of the more creative ones.
Re:cool (Score:1, Informative)
We're about to upgrade at my work. Its between the SPA-841's and the IP-500's. Both look pretty nice!
More info from the Asterisk wiki
http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php?page=Poly
Re:This is cool... (Score:4, Informative)
Background: You can't connect two ISDN devices or two modems with some kind of cross cable witout some additional tricks. To drive analog phones, you need a modem card with FXS support, for ISDN telephones, the card must support the NT-mode. E.g. the Junghanns QuadBRI card support NT and can drive up to 4 ISDN lines. The Wildcard TDM400P supports FXS can drive four analog devices. Both run fine with Asterisk.
Acronyms:
FXS: Foreinge Exchange Subscriber
NT: Network Trminator
YACSA - Yet another cliche supporting article (Score:3, Informative)
Sure, if you want to use Asterisk to its full potential, then you have to learn a thing or two. But that isn't any different from any other tool, be it Apache, IIS, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel, InDesign, Photoshop, Bryce, Final Cut, etc etc etc.
The important thing however is that you can get started with Asterisk very easily and without any special skillset.
The article doesn't mention anything about the fact that you can download an Asterisk installer for MacOS X along with a few configuration wizards and have a running PBX within a few minutes. It also doesn't mention that there is a similar Asterisk installer for Windows. At present, the Mac is the easiest platform to set up a basic PBX with Asterisk, but it shouldn't be too long before there will be configuration wizards for Asterisk on Windows, too.
Asterisk for MacOS X: http://www.sunrise-tel.com/ [sunrise-tel.com]
Asterisk for Windows: http://www.asteriskwin32.com/ [asteriskwin32.com]
How can we expect decision makers in companies to consider Asterisk if it is always presented as a Linux toy which requires Linux gurus to set up and run. That's precisely the kind of perception the incumbent proprietary system vendors love to promote when they pinch their overpriced stuff.
Let those people know that Asterisk is multi-platform and have them play with it on their platform of choice and there will soon be more mainstream deployments and more ease of use front ends.
Other than for Linux, Asterisk is so far available for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD and Irix (both through the NetBSD package manager), MacOSX/Darwin, Windows and Solaris. Zaptel drivers (to use telephony interface cards) are available or in the works for FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX and Solaris. If that doesn't deserve mentioning in an article about an Asterisk cottage industry, then I don't know what does.
Re:This is cool... (Score:4, Informative)
2. To hook up just plain old phones to Asterisk you need FXS cards. FXS= hook phones up to Asterisk.
Or you can get VoIP phones and hook them up to a 100BaseT or 1000BaseT network. I will probably also want to use a power inserter so you can have power over ethernet or PoE. That way the phones will get their power over the network connection and will not have to have a wall wart.
Or you can use a softphone. A softphone is a program that runs under Windows, Linux, BSD, PalmOS, WinCE, or the Mac that uses your computers soundcard as a telephone.
Your best place to look is the VoIP Wiki http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php [voip-info.org].
Another good site is the Asterisk@Home project http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]. It is a Linux/Asterisk distro. Pop it in and you get an Asterisk box. Warning! This is NOT a live CD. It will reformat your hard drive and install Linux and Asterisk on it.