VOIP Industry

VOIP Industry

Posts 1-4 of 4
  • Martin List-Petersen
    Martin List-Petersen
    The company name is only visible to registered members.
    Asterisk - Swiss knife of telephony

    Asterisk is often referred to as the "swiss knife of telephony", which hits the nail on the head. It is has a large featureset. The downside is that the learning curve is very steep and the tone in the Asterisk community can be very harsh for rookies, if they ask questions that just are asked every time over and over again. For companies that are interested in deploying this kind of technologies there are plenty of consultants around, that will help you get going and make your life a lot easier.

    Asterisk is a PABX system that combines the traditional telephony world with modern ip based approaches, besides that you'll get voicemail, conferencing, messaging and call center features for free. A broad amount of hardware is supported, often quite inexpensive in comparison to traditional PABX systems.

    One thing Asterisk not should be mistaken for is a Directory Server for Internet Telephony. Asterisk is a Media Gateway with the limitations that this would have: Asterisk will not let go of the media stream, actually it can, but that again leaves you with no way of billing the call. When dealing with Asterisk allways keep in mind, that it's approach comes from the traditional telephony world. Internet Telephony is just a nice add-on, that is implemented a lot better than in other PABX systems. And since Asterisk is running on a regular Linux server, you can add and integrate other services to run in parallel on the same box, like you fax-server.

    There are ports for Asterisk out there, to let it run on FreeBSD also, but the problem is that most telephony hardware not is supported on that platform.

    Anyhow, this reflects my personal opinion on Asterisk and you will find a lot of others out there, that do not share it. The best way is simply to make your own opinion. Try it out.
    • 30 May 2005, 12:51 pm
  • Brian Jerome
    Brian Jerome
    The company name is only visible to registered members.
    Re: Asterisk - Swiss knife of telephony
    I totally agree. Our company has been working with it since it came out and has actually contributed some of the code over the years. We have fully integrated it with our VoIP billing software written in PHP and running in SQL databases. We use it for our retail services at http://www.calgarytelecom.com IAX just works better than SIP or h323, is WAY more secure and handles NAT without much trouble at all. Plus it is free and you can duplicate it over and over again. We are currently setting up an Asterisk farm at our datacenter in 60 Hudson ST. NY. All IAX devices and Asterisk boxes will be able to terminate their calls there onto the PSTN. We will be accepting the traffic as IAX..........we will also accept SIP, but our focus is on Asterisk as we feel it will be the next standard, if not THE standard within a few short years.
    • 02 Aug 2005, 09:44 am
  • Post visible to registered members
  • Lei Fu
    Lei Fu
    The company name is only visible to registered members.
    Re^2: Asterisk - Swiss knife of telephony
    we are developing the videoconference, but first of all, we need to finish one to multi-point video communication.
    • 09 May 2006, 02:24 am