Asterisk Breeds A Cottage Industry

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."

Note

[elid]

Note that not all of the solutions are open-source like PBX, although AMP is.

This is cool...

[Saint Aardvark]

...but what I would really like is an in-depth intro (contradiction in terms, I know) to telephone technology. I can set up a web server, I know how to firewall in three different languages, and I can understand at least a third of any C you put in front of me -- but man, phone technology just makes my head hurt.

The company I work for is moving in a couple months, and we're taking the opportunity to upgrade our voicemail system. For a while I had hopes of maybe getting Asterisk to do it -- yay Free Software -- but then I started looking into it. As near as I can figure, after a day's Googling, our regular, analog, non-VOIP Meridian phones just won't talk to Asterisk-compatible hardware...but that's what I told the boss. (That, and I didn't have time to do it.)

The honest truth is, I suspected it couldn't be done, or at least couldn't be done cheaply, but I couldn't wrap my head around what I was reading. I began to understand how my father feels when I try to explain to him what I'm doing.

I have rarely felt so ignorant as when I tried to understand what hardware and what connections from the phone company would be needed:

1. to connect Asterisk to the telephone company's wires (the CO, I think)
2. to connect Asterisk to our own phones so calls could come in
3. and to let us make phone calls out.

I tried finding some consultant or company who could do this for us, but no luck. So we're getting a bigger and better version of the Norstar system we've got now. And that's fine -- it's done, someone else is doing it, and someone else is going to support it. But some kind of phone-networking-for-dummies would've been great.

Who needs a GUI?

[zmanea]

If a GUI is so important wouldnt Cisco have one for their routers/switches? Setting up extensions in Asterisk is no harder than setting up an access list on a router. If you need a GUI then maybe you should not be doing it.

Will it take off?

[datafr0g]

It wasn't long ago (still is in some parts) that PBX tech was primarily proprietory software running on expensive proprietory hardware.

As most PBX manufacturers are moving towards converged networks, VoIP, etc - more and more focus is being placed on Software and standards making these systems cheaper and cheaper.

Asterisk will have a lot of competition in the small biz market. I really love the technology, and think the project's fantastic, but if I were running a business and looking to purchase a PBX, I'd probably stear clear of Asterisk.
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. 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 really hope it works out and at a minimum, hopefully it'll draw PBX costs down, but as the vendor based systems cost is currently very low and given that the margins for support, etc are also low in this field, I don't expect too much from the biz side of these things.

HOWEVER, if someone can translate the tech into something that can really save a business money and they can garuntee uptime, then they'll do well.

Money Making Opportunity.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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. "

Translation: If you want to make money with OSS? Make it complicated, and difficult to use.

Re:This is cool...

[bahwi]

Yeah, one of the big problems with Asterisk is, even though it is a *nix program, it is not really a *nix program, but takes a *nix box and makes it into a very configurable PBX, not the other way around. It's great, but, uh, difficult.

1. To connect to the telephone co, you'd need a T1 or ISDN PRI(Voice T1, not Data).
2. Digium (digium.com) has hardware to connect it to regular phone lines, ditto for out.

To connect to regular phones you need FXO ports, and to connect to outgoing phones you need FXS ports. Digium has hardware, and a few others. DLink has a good VoIP router(with QoS and everything).

I'm slowly getting my stuff together to be a consultant for this stuff, but I've got a lot to learn myself. It's too big of a market, but coming together.

You want a new PBX? Use Asterisk. You just need Voicemail? Asterisk. Want an IVR? Asterisk. Need a call center? Asterisk. Want to do call queuing? Asterisk. Need a predictive dialer? Asterisk.

Holy crap, that just solved so many problems, but impossible to configure.

Rolled Asterix out this weekend

[Colin E. McDonald]

Rolled out an Asterix PBX this weekend. Snom 360 IP POE phones connected to Fedora Core 3
box (HP DC 7100) with two Digium FXO cards. VoIP from the desk sets to server then outbound PSTN
(Public Switched Telephone Network). Used the Asterisk Management Portal front-end GUI so the
local users could have complete control over the management of the system. All I can say is....sweet.

Re:This is cool...

[Rafke]

I advice you to subscribe to the asterisk users mailing list and read it for some time. It has a surprising mix of pros and newbies.

Asterisk-Users mailing list [digium.com]

Re:Using Asterisk on a call center

[masonc]

You are on the right track. The Call Detail Records (CDR) are comprehensive and there are packages to analyse them. I am also using a Call Accounting package that does costing by groups of extensions.

Call Monitoring, the recordsing of each call tot he ahrddrive is a native application and I am about to implement for a stock trading company I am working with.
Asterisk is stable, powerful and free. If you are using IP phones and routing all calls through a VOIP provider, all you need is a linux server. I you need to connect to the PSTN lines, a 2 in 2 out card is only $500, and there are much larger interfaces for large scale analog phones and pstn lines.
Contrary to opinion, learning to configure Asterisk is not hard, it just takes some time and a chance to experiment. I implemented it as our home office system first before offering it to clients. My family are fed up with the often broken system but you have to have that chance to play around if you are going to understand the dialplan options.
Send me an email if you need any help (masonc ..at..masonc .. dot com)

Re:Will it take off?

[The_Morgan]

I can't imagine that you have actually priced out a 'vendor' system. They are anything but low priced. After being quoted 20 grand for a 15-20 phone system and being told that support costs will be outragous, you would do exactly what my boss did.

Keep the ancient system that was fried by lighting. God knows the PC tech will keep the system limping along 15 years past its due date.

Asterisk in actual use

[syslog]

We develop some highly sophisticated field services software (GPS tracking, jobs sent to phones, black boxes, GIS etc etc). One of our key modules is "Call Ahead". When a cable guy, for example, completes installation at customer A, our software automatically calls the next customer on his job list, informing them that the cable guy is on his way, and will be there in x minutes. We do this via Asterisk (obviously). We charge our client (the cable company in this example) a small fee per call. If not for asterisk, we would have had to use some proprietery solution from Avaya, Intertel Tech etc, along with service from a carrier like MCI or SBC etc. This would have cost BIG dollars. We could not have provided our clients with an economical solution. This is a perfect example of open source enabling a business that could not happen otherwise.

Asterisk is a really extremely full featured high-end telco switch. The configurations is a little painful, but the quality is superb.

naeem

Agilis Systems [agilissystems.com]

Re:This is cool...

[sirsnork]

Whilst this is good advice, be prepared for a TON of email on that list... it's a VERY busy list

Quality, Cheap SIP phone? Sure.

[JohnBaleshiski]

Do you have a good speakerphone already for pots? Keep it and buy a Sipura 2000. It provides 2 lines and I bought one for $82 on eBay. At home, I have 2 normal cordless phones connected to it, and of course Asterisk running on a dedicated box. Good stuff.