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Comments · 6
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Re:IP Telephony Confuses Me
I am in exactly the same situation, setting up a IP based system for a small company.
I would start by reading this http://www.asteriskdocs.org/ it helped a lot, its biased towards asterisk, but also explains a lot of the terminology -
Asterisk, But Not Pure VOIP
> from POTS to VoIP.
I have been managing an Asterisk installation at my
company for several months now. The Asterisk PBX has
been rock solid and absolutely amazing. It works so well,
I working on another Asterisk install for a spin-off
corporation as well.
First, background. My father is an old-school
telecommunications manager who frowns upon VOIP. I had
five years in the voice-on-demand (audiotext, IVR)
industry before doing more general system admin and
database work for the last ten years.
Everything you need to know is in O'Reilly's 'Asterisk:
The Future of Telephony'...
http://www.asteriskdocs.org/modules/tinycontent/in dex.php?id=11.
That is a great primer on both VOIP and telecommunications
as well as a strong installation guide for Asterisk. Download
the PDF version and read it before you make any decisions.
Our implementation is a hybrid. While our phones
are SIP (Cisco 7960G) and our PBX is Asterisk, most of our
traffic is carried on a PRI. Local and long distance calls
run across the PRI. This gives us very reliable service and
good voice quality. Plus, a PRI (with tens of thousands of
minutes a month of long distance included) costs about the
same (or less) as the bandwidth necessary to support the
VOIP calls and VOIP-to-telco provider.
For our international calls, we do have accounts with
a few VOIP-to-telco providers and route those calls over IAX.
I wouldn't go entirely VOIP if phone calls are important
to your company. As often as one in seven tries, our VOIP
routes fail for one reason or another and rotate to the next
provide. For the few international calls as we do, our users
rarely notice. If we were using VOIP for all our calls, I can
see these spurious anomalies as being a huge problem.
The advantage to Asterisk as a PBX is not so much its
ability to provide dialtone at a reasonable price. Even a
commercial PBX can do that at about the same price point.
The advantage to Asterisk is that the extras are free.
Voicemail isn't an added cost. IVR isn't an added cost.
Having Asterisk pull its caller-id data from your CRM
solution (in our case, SalesLogix) instead of just using
the telco-provided data isn't an added cost.
My father still swears by Ma'Bell. And in terms of
absolute reliability, he's right. Ma'Bell can get you five
nines year after year. A well-configured, well-administrated
Asterisk system with PRIs (instead of pure VOIP) is close but
still isn't quite there yet. But, by the time you add in all
the additional costs for a commercial PBX, Asterisk is by far
the less expensive solution.
I'll take four nines in exchange for tens of thousands
of dollars savings a year.
Matt -
Re:Next on SlashdotHere are some good asterisk resources.
The Offical Asterisk IRC channel!
irc.freenode.net
#Asterisk
Note: you must be registered and identified with NickServ to join the channel as we've had a lot of problems with spambots.
To do so simply
then
Come on in and say hi!
Some links
The Wiki [voip-info.org] bar none the best resource.
The Asterisk Documentation Project [asteriskdocs.org]
more links [digium.com] (look at the "Unnoficial Links")
Mod me up! -
Useful Asterisk ResourcesUseful Asterisk Links:
The Asterisk Wiki
Note: the wiki search is useless. Search with google instead, use "searchterm site:voip-info.org" (without quotes).
The Asterisk Documentation Project
The Asterisk Mailing Lists
Note: to search the lists use google again. "searchterm site:lists.digium.com" (without quotes)" in google.
the #asterisk chat room on irc.freenode.org. Drop by and say hello.
Note that due to problems with massive spambot attacks regisitration is required to join the channel. Simply type
The next time you join you will need to type
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Re:Enjoy your IAXy...Here are some good asterisk resources.
The Offical Asterisk IRC channel!
irc.freenode.net
#Asterisk
Note: you must be registered and identified with NickServ to join the channel as we've had a lot of problems with spambots.
To do so simply
then
Come on in and say hi!
Some links
The Wiki
The Asterisk Documentation Project
Andy's Getting Started With Asterisk Guide (it's written for a old version of asterisk, but still useful)
ManxPower's site
For some advanced examples see John Todd's site
Also read all files in
more links (look at the "Unnoficial Links")
Mod me up! -
Don't use CSS. Use DocBook!
I have been using DocBook in a project recently, and I think it is a much better alternative to using CSS. If you write the documentation in DB, then you can export it to a PDF, HTML, or a number of other formats. (I'll plug the http://www.asteriskdocs.org project)