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Will VoIP Kill the PBX?
gManZboy writes "Following up on their last VoIP article, Queue just posted "Not Your Father's PBX?" from Jim Coffman at Avaya Labs. Looks like the PBX may survive, but it's going to have to evolve considerably. I guess eventually corporate telecom goes away as a kind of island in the MIS dept? Maybe that's already happened?"
You can't integrate your PBX with your application server. But have you got Tomcat servlets controlling your Asterisk server, and being "called" by it?
--
make install -not war
We use 3Com's NBX system for our small business. The convenience of a PBX, with the convenience of running over Ethernet and/or IP and configuration via web browser. That meant no independant telephony guys, just building the system and configuring it.
There are VoIP gateways, but to be honest, we just have one location go out of PSTN and another over a T1, it wasn't worth going through the headaches, but for a larger company, it is. However, we can tie together over our VPN the two systems, so inter-office calls go over IP, not the phone system.
As the PBXes are being interfaced via computer, there is no need to have the telephony guys in their own world.
Alex
not in the US anyhow. not with fbi wiretapping provisions staggering adoption.
See Asterix, which works with three VoIP protocols.
Personally, I'm intrigued by software like Asterix and its capabilities, but I have absolutely no telephony knowledge and I'm not really sure where to start, like what kind of hardware I'd need in order to set this up with POTS. Lots of modems? Special cards for the phones in the office?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
And what praytell will be responsible for your complex dialplans (routing) or giving access to client SIP phones? PBX's aren't going anywhere but *of course* they have to evolve, it is amazing they have remained sedantary for so long.
If you wonder where the PBX is heading look at the simple office copying machine. They used to make copies. Now they make copies, colate, autoscale, create PDFs on the fly and then fax the results to someone while storing the PDF somewhere AND emailing a copy to a lit of people. The PBX of next year will integrate even more so than the one's of today in a cheaper, faster way.
The PBX isn't going extinct but many of the specialized lockin systems and consultants may.
--- I do not moderate.
So far, VoIP has been a boon for the large companies who have the money to implement it between corporate sites. It seems to me as if it will take quite a while for network effect to kick in and have enough market share for it to be worthwhile as the sole delivery of voice services.
The other issue is that much of the IT staff don't comprehend the Telecom issues, like line hunting, rollover, etc.. Unless they have been explicitly trained on it. I think we'll still have a staff of Telecom folks who are instead trained up in additional IT concepts like routing, VLAN's, etc.
When someone who *doesn't* work for a telecom manufacturer starts saying stuff like this, I might listen.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Geez, and I've been doing both all these years. Don't I feel screwed...
blah, blah, blah
The infastructure is already there, the quality is the same and can be better, and the price is much cheaper, not to mention more services running over the same lines cuts costs and increases the convience of maintnence. However, relying to much on a system based completly on VOIP could cause outages without the proper redundancy. Also, phreakers would be sad, either that or they would just become hackers...
From my experience over the past several years it's been getting closer to making a big jump. My company has used Avaya products for awhile now, going back to the old AT&T Merlin line even. They have a good selection of VoIP products.
To me the biggest stumbling block is how that traditional PBX'es are more hardware-centric and VoIP is more software-centric. Which do you think traditionally has been more reliable?
Consider mean time between failure rates for tradtional PBX voice services. Then consider a typical VoIP environment. I don't have hard figures, but I would imagine there's still a vast difference. Imagine a facility using VoVPN then extrapolating it out a little further.
If there are cost savings to VoIP and the PHB's for a company are placing that as a higher priority than reliability and security then perhaps things will continue to move toward VoIP. But I personally have worked as both a telco and a data tech and I think that traditional PBX'es are still more bulletproof than newer VoIP packages. If I'm wrong I'd be happy to hear...
My parents were in the hurricane in Florida and lost power (of course). No electricity, no internet, no cordless phones and the cell phone towers were out as well.
The corded phone plugged into the wall outlet worked for hours after the power went out and was on days before the power was restored.
In the US the phone system is required to have its own separate power supply/source to ensure that communications continue.
I'm not a luddite, I'm all for VOIP, cordless phones, etc. But in this case, I also like redundancy!
I am an IT manager for a mid sized publishing company and we just replaced our phone system. We looked at both IP based and traditional PBXs. We went with the traditional PBX with an IP gateway. It did not make sense to abandon the investment in phone wiring and complicate our data network at the same time. Keeping the two separate but connected reduces points of failure and allowed us to leverage a very proven technology. The only parts of the install that were difficult were with the IP side of the system. The traditional PBX side went off with out a hitch. The vendors are experienced and the tools are proven. For a company with out a dedicated telcom department and a simple network plan the traditional phone systems made the most sense.
We installed a Telrad PBX system with VoIP, 30 VoIP phones for sales people around the country, and 85 hardwired in the building.
The PBX now sits in a 19" rack, along side the rest of the servers. Its console is web based for programming, its just another thing in the data center, if changes need to be made a request comes into the IT dept now rather then an outside consultiant.
"The word "genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein," - Joe Theisman
I certainly hope so, just to make things easier. I know the telecom guys need to make a living, but the idea of plunking down $50-90K for a Sprint or Nortel solution is just painful. Our local telecom people (read: the office managers that take care of the extensions and phone lists) can swap extensions to different jacks around the office and setup new voicemail. Anything more complication and it's a several hundred dollar service call. I'd welcome the days where that could go away, replaced with user-manageable software. That and the cheaper wiring costs alone are enough for me.
Nothing but the finest in meaningless drivel
Is it just me, or is the boy still crying wolf? Wasn't VOIP going to take over in 1998? I'm not saying it's not an excellent technology, nor am I implying it won't take over PBXs, but the article is no different than any other 1998 Voice IP is Here, all your pbx are belong to us! articles. Seriously, what's the hold up?
It definitely has a lot of people looking, simply because the VoIP solution is *considerably* cheaper than the traditional telecom support contract. VoIP also has the promise that it will be easier to expand/upgrade. IMHO, VoIP just needs solid QoS, then it will become a no-brainer for most to switch over.
This story's headline fills me with a faint form of Schadenfreude:
IP telephony is the technology I pitched to my company's management, when they saddled me with thankless chore of upgrading our decrepit digital key system.
PBX is what they ended up buying.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Voip currently needs PBX to exist to be be the
most effective. However, it's making PBX less
profitable and therefore less likely to exist.
I'm not sure I like how the economics of all
this is going to play out.
Can people post howto's or give some explanation on how they use Asterix? There is little information on their web site other than a list of supported hardware. It looks like there is a 10$ modem (Intel winmodem?) that can be used with it??
:(
Is this the only thing you need in order to use Asterix or do you need to invest a lot of $$$ in hardware?
I'm also curious what kind of setup you need on the phone side? ISDN? Normal phone line? Can you do VOIP from 1 Asterix to another? (across continents) etc etc.
Very interesting product but little information
-- Leeeter than leet
We used Avaya, and the main advantage, is while it is VoIP, the backplane of the PBX is good 'ol TDM. SO our sites can have a mix of digital, VoIP, and analog phones. Also if you currently have an avaya PBX, you can doa quick swap, and keep your TDM phones but do site-to-site with H.323 IP Trunks, and add VoIP phones as you go. The management aspect of VoIP is often overlooked. While the new features, dial routing ability (route outside calls out the PRI of the closest office) are nice, there is alot of troubleshooting and M/A/C work that has to be done. Its more like managing network gear (switches, etc) then PCs/Servers. The system has meant more work, not less, because there is ZERO integration with our AD infrastructure. We have to add users and maintain users in like 4 different places now. Atleast Cisco's Call Manager is ActiveDirectory Integrated.
When was the last time an invention just outright killed its less advanced or less cool predecessor?
Remember the floppy drive? CD and Dvd and digital media were supposed to kill it, but it has been "dying" for years now. These things take time!
Yes, 50 years from now existing PBX will be but a fond memory to most of us. But it won't happen overnight. The same way a car's look evolves, so does the technology. This is both because people like familiar things, but also because companies like to eek out all potential profitability from every idea and product before moving on to the next thing.
It's just not profitable to "kill" a widely used technology like that.
There's no special wiring involved anymore, the terminals (phones) are computers in their own right, connected to the enterprise IT network, speaking IP.
It's not an island, it's part of the modern IT infrastructure.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
We're using a Toshiba CTX670 and a 100 in a remote office. Its all web-configurable (except the voicemail on the smaller 100, its not as advanced). We have all kinds of lines coming and going, POTS, PRI, digital over cat3, digital over cat5. We even link the offices over our data VPN, that saves a LOT of money in long distance calling.
A previous poster mentioned the high cost of office-to-office VPN... its nothing compared to 6 months of daily calls across the country.
Bottom line is, there's a lot of systems already out there that are bridging the gap between basic phone service PBX and desktop integration.
No.
However, I would pay for VoIP to kill this horrible color scheme.
Come to the wplug's general user meeting:
GUM TOPIC: "VoIP with Asterisk"
Talk Abstract: Cost savings is something every business looks to do. Incorporating VoIP using the open source PBX software Asterisk allows someone to easily purchase telephone termination service from a low cost provider anywhere in the world rather than being forced into using your local telephone service provider such as Verizon or AT&T. Asterisk, is very flexible, allowing individuals or large corporations a complete solution in running their own home voicemail or corporate PBX system.
-- john
There's no way the phone companies are going away because they'll just con you into using their service to keep dsl. I have DTV & a cell phone. I have no need for a phone line or cable television.
But when I get broadband I can either pay $55/mo. for DSL & Phone or $60/mo. for DSL w/out phone service. Cable is $70 w/Internet or $60 for internet alone.
The small PABX is quite specialised. You can pick one up in Europe for a few hundred Euros which will talk ISDN on a standard line (i.e., 4 concurrent conversations), it has Least Cost Routing and all kinds of features but isn't aware of VOIP yet. It will support up to 4 analogue lines plus an internal ISDN bus.
It comes to about the same price as a single 4-line card for Asterisk and then you have to add the PC to build around it. It really is quite expensive for the small business unless you really need the extra functionality.
See my journal, I write things there
When the manual switchboards were replaced with analog/mechanical switching, it did cause some changes to the system. You couldn't just speak into the phone and be connected, you had to manually dial a number. That particular change cut both ways - it wasn't quite so convenient, but it was less prone to error and it did allow more people to have phone service.
Then, along came digital exchanges. Early digital exchanges had numerous programming bugs (to be expected) but these have now been largely ironed out. Digital exchanges are faster, more reliable and easier to maintain, but the changes haven't been really visible to end users.
Now, we're moving into the VoIP era. Instead of dedicated lines and switched circuits, we're looking at a packet-based system with routing. VoIP reduces the resources needed (it can - in theory - make use of any spare network capacity between the two points to be connected) and it simplifies some of the more complex types of call. (Multi-point phone calls over IP are as simple as a multicast, for example. Over a switched circuit, it takes a bit more effort.)
Will VoIP kill the PBX? It depends on how you define the PBX. If you think of the PBX as a person manually connecting you, then the mechanical relay exchanges killed the PBX. If you think of it as merely the mechanism (human or otherwise) by which two or more people can be connected, then routers become the "new" PBX.
Of course, true VoIP will only be possible with a migration to IPv6. There are simply too many phone numbers, which would need an IP address, to use IPv4. Also, IPv6 headers are simpler, which makes routing more efficient. This makes the complexity of routing over much more complex networks possible. Finally, IPv6 doesn't fragment, which means that packet garbling should be less common.
It'll also require much higher bandwidths. The Internet is just too crowded to support much in the way of high-quality audio traffic. Packet loss is a shade too high, and latencies need to be cut. Your computer can quite comfortably handle uneven packet transmission, but the human ear can't. To fool the ear, you need much smoother traffic flows.
Smoother flows mean you need lower hop counts. This means the backbone needs to be better connected. There's been a tendancy for backbones to move towards the simplest possible layout. That's great for economics, but it means that paths are maximised. Not good for VoIP. It also means that if there's any outage, there's unlikely to be an alternative route, which means that network segments will be disconnected. Also not good for VoIP.
Telephone companies will be around for a long time, because they're about the only ones with the infrastructure and capital to build the highly connected networks required for VoIP. This is not a time for telephone companies to be concerned, this is their golden opportunity to demonstrate their continued relevence.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I'd see we were talking about corporate PBX's...
Ptpptht! Every office I've been in in the last 10 years has required a small nuclear power plant for each phone. (And my current office requires a PC connected to the PBX to route the calls)
So for corporate use, nah do whatever.
But don't change out the home system until we have a suitable alternative. (redundant cell phone tower power, etc)
I'm sorry... I just don't like the idea of mixing the unreliability of PeeCees with the PBX. Sure, the voice mail hosts are stable (Unixware with Audry Audix and the age old "I'm Sorry your having trouble.".... But the whole hoopla with these asterisk boxes. I *LAUGH* everytime an email hits the asterisk-users list "HELP HELP NO CALLS ARE WORKING I DON'T KNOW WHATS WRONG!!@#"
... meanwhile Merlin Legends and Definities complete year after year of uninterrupted service.
That is what you get! Friends with NBX's telling me about how they crash, and all phone calls in the entire building halt. That is hilarious! Should of bought a Definity.
Silly IT managers buying the latest and "greatest"
(Not saying that hardware PBXes don't fail).
Southeastern Virginia REPRESENT!
Damn you! Buggles in my head again...
Organizationally, it started happening quite a while ago, at least in some industries. I worked as an IT director in a "Wall Street" firm for several years, and ended up with responsibility for telecoms, too. That wasn't because I sought it, or even wanted it -- I had to get up to speed on a whole bunch of new (to me) stuff -- but because it just made sense:
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IT was itself the largest single purchaser of telecom services, since we had to provision links for market data, order transmission to the exchange, our private WAN, links to settlement / clearing agents, and so on.
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The majority of telecom services had to interface, one way or another, with computer systems (e.g., to receive market data or to transmit trade data).
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The PBXs and trading floor telephone systems were computer systems. (I can recall getting a new AT&T PBX installed. Their techs went to lunch while we were still testing. We found a little problem, which I looked up in the manual and fixed. The AT&T foreman was surprised at that: I told him "Hey, it's just a UNIX box.")
-
Following on to the last point, evaluating and choosing telecom systems steadily took more and more "systems-type" knowledge.
Buying a PBX was just buying a computer with some specialized I/O hardware; and it came with systems concerns -- security, for example, or the difference in performance between satellite and terrestrial links for TCP/IP.
Now, of course, we are seeing things like Asterix and VoIP, which will provide much tighter integration. Traditional voice comms are still important, but they're by no means something unto themselves.I worked as a tester on a leading manufacturers VoIP product a few years back. (2000-2001). At that point, everyone was very much VoIP will kill pbx. However, it became apparent to me that VoIP suffers from 2 things: 1. Traditional comms guys don't trust it all that much. 2. IS/IT/Comms won't trust it because if it is doing a combined job, like some of the SoHo VoIP switches available, if the thing goes down your office is at a standstill. The technology is however, basically good.
but i can't resist when i see a throwback to my grade school days. if you read the "from the department" lines, like i do, you noticed a reference to this, and if you take the time to read it you'll find puns equally as clever as the reference in the summary.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it.
-Oscar Wilde
I submitted this story about 5 years ago, whilst working for a telco in Chicago that was about to (failingly) introduce VOIP to the market place. It never aired.
Love ya, slashdot.
Until my internet connection is stable enough to stay up for years at a time I will not trust my line to 911 and other services replaced. We had Vonage and its just fine, works like a charm, until as usual the internet connection goes down. This seems to happen about once ever month where im at. The phone since I was old enough to use it has never been off.
24/7/365
There is never a maintenance window with your phone even a planned one.
VOIP will obviously take over standard PBXs, but the equipment manufacturers are going to slow it down as long as they can. All that proprietary hardware is extremely expensive/proftitable. Just like residential customers will continue to have traditional landlines for quite some time, businesses will take a while to convert.
One of the things that VOIP requires is a good knowledge of business phone service. You almost have to have a PBX guy on staff in addition to the IT department just to design/manage the dial plans, voice mail, etc. As much as the vendors insist, it's _not_ a simple drop-in-a-server-and-some-phones proposition.
Asterisk plays VERY well with conventional PBXs.
I've setup Asterisk boxes with T1 or PRI links to old PBXes in the US / London / German offices of my company. It works great. Everybody uses the phones already on their desks, calls between offices are free, and Asterisk allows many more features, all accessible by non-wizard users via an access code.
It's also trivial to shop around for good deals in call termination, which is tough to do with normal telcos.
Longer term, the IP stuff will win, but there is no real justification for throwing the current stuff into the trash, just yet.
OK, We are a 180-user law firm. Our ROLM switch is more or less rock solid but pushing 20 years old is a bit dated. (Caller id? what's that?) Our Octel 100 Voicemail is already EOL.
.1 of an hour and the narrative saying "Telephone call to Joe Williams".
So the next Big Project is to replace the phone system. VOIP is exciting and all that but since we are only one location the long distance savings just aren't there.
I'd like to tie the voice system to the messaging system (Exchange) so the users can have complete control over voicemail and the phone from the desktop. Also I'd like the switch to relay call information to the accounting system for lawyer time entries, not just call cost. e.g. Lawyer chooses a contact from Outlook that is tied to a matter and chooses New Call To. When they hang up the phone the system adds a timecard to the accounting system with the date, lawyer who made the call, tie rounded up to the nearest
Asterix is OK as a basic VOIP PBX for small offices but the development of the above integration would be overwhelming. Cisco's Unity products look like what we're after, but pricey.
Maybe I should submit this as an Ask Slashdot topic.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Ethernet is designed to use four of the NON-VOICE wires in a standard 8 wire cable. All 8 wire, twisted pair (typically found connecting phones to a PBX or computers to your Ethernet HUB CAN run on the same wires. However, most people choose not to.
Basically, the savings is bull. Companies want ethernet separate from voice because they terminate at different devices.
In conclusion, all this will do is move everybody from two wires -- computer and phone -- to two wires computer and IP Telephony Device.
Again, you can argue that the computer and telephone can be the SAME BOX, and you are right the capabilities have been around for ten years (or even longer), but desktop computers -- to this day -- are not considered stable enough (even though, in truth most of them are) to run something as ubiquitous and important as a phone.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
...are slowly being adopted by corporations. I work for a Fortune 500 in Corporate IT and two new locations in Northern VA both got brand new Nortel VoIP PBXes in them. They run completely IP-based back to another NoVA location, where the calls are then routed based on their destinations. These two locations are two of the first to have this kind of system for our company in the National Capital Area, according to Corporate Telecom. The company, however, has used VoIP with traditional PBXes between the major regional locations, as well as overseas, for over a year now.
The IP network the phones are on, though, is completely separate from the corporate LAN/WAN, with the only link (that I know of - I didn't design the network or anything) between the two being the Voicemail server, which can be accessed either via the phone (duh) or through Outlook with Nortel's CallPilot MAPI service.
I happen to work in one of the locations, and it's great because I can dial 5 digits to reach anyone else in this network, including our regional HQ out here. It's time-saving (not that dialing twice as many digits takes that much longer, but every second counts yanno), plus the person I'm calling can see who it is calling them, as the system (usually) has a name associated with each extension. And I can also see if I've misdialed, because I'll see a different name than I would be expecting to see.
I run an Altigen PBX system at my offices, it does just about everything including VOIP if I wanted to use it. We have one T1 comming in that does both data and voice. 50% of the channels go to voice with 50% going to data (so 768kb). However if a voice channel isn't being used it gets switched over to data. We can then hook up a bunch of analog phones (single pair) or VOIP phones (10/100Base-T) and assign numbers to them. Oh yes, did I mention that the version of Altigen we're running is about five years old?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I use my copier multiple times a week, we keep paper records for anything financial.
I use my fax ALL the time, because if I need to send a physical document to someone, EVERYONE has a fax machine. If they have a fax server, than they get it electronically.
My phone system CANNOT go down. If a server goes down, people get coffee and get back to work, plus their already open documents are fine and they can save locally until it comes back up. If the phone system goes down, no sales are taking place.
The sales guys that bring in the money into the company aren't going to tolerate ANYTHING but reliable telephony. However, the "vritual PBXes" give the appearance of hardware, the flexibility of software, and a roll-out in the middle.
I can upgrade my Ethernet-based PBX with a few hundred software upgrade when I want new features. It's better than a hardware roll-out, but ultimately, it uses dedicated hardware for interfacing with the world.
Alex
and found out that it's way expensive.
Since we're moving the company, we thought it might be time to updgrade the phone system while we were at it. We have a Nortel Meridian1 Option 11 phone switch.
We currently have over 300 active ports (includes the trunks, digital ports, analog ports, voice mail ports, etc). We have roughly 188 digital phones in the company. We also have a remote shelf going to a remote warehouse location tied to us using an MPL split 12 channels voice and 12 data. We also have a call center, therefore we also use the ACD feature. I'm not too happy with our ACD software provider though. We're not using Nortel's Symposium. We're using Telecorp Products.
As you can see, we have invested alot into our phone system, yet we wanted something easier to manage and troubleshoot. Unfortunately, noone in the company knows how to program this phone switch. I only know some of the basic commands to stat a line and get into the Meridian Mail system. So, we pay a company to maintain the phone switch. We would be nice to either eliminate that, or minimize the need of a third party maintenance company.
Anyway, we looked at Mitel's solution (3300 ICP) and was quoted about $160,000 for 2 of the servers plus about 188 phones. That's really not alot of money, but when we saw what we were getting for the trade in then we realized it wasn't worth it. Imagine, if we have 188 phone and they're roughly 200 bucks each. That's like $40,000 that we would be throwing away not to mention the cost of the phone switch. That's just not happening, so we're keeping the phone switch. It works. It just needs to evolve.
The good thing is that our cabinets are upgradable. Pop-out the cards and replace them with another one. We're looking into options with Nortel, but that's the thing. They don't have many options right now. But the thing is that the cost of a phone system isn't the cost of the system itself, it's the cost of the phones and we don't want to throw out the phones. (did that make sense?)
Anyway, we're looking into Call Pilot and Succession software. Maybe we can make that thing more user friendly.
PBX won't die... this is a convergence issue. Nortel, Ericsson and other traditional telecoms are changing PBXs to support VoP (Voice over Packet). Cisco and other traditional networking companies are building more "green field" VoP systems - functionally adding PBX features to their routing (or multi service switch) systems. Neither is doing to die; but they will start to look remarkably similar to each other as time goes along.
The best analogy to this is the number of routing functions that the high end switches have acquired - while there is still a distinction between routers and switches, the value propositions are not as differentiated as they were 10 years ago.
I have a phone in every room of the house, addressable as an extension.
I have phone lines from Verizon, internet phone services via the Asterisk IAX protocol and Asterisk on Linux controlling it all.
I provide total phone service to my family 1500 miles away via the internet (dial in/out - local/LD).
Digium FXO/FXS cards make the phones work.
I expect that in two years one will be able to walk into compusa and get a pre-built Asterisk for home or office, just like a linksys firewall/router.
Some of my phones are IP phones, some are regular phones. Asterisk handles both via Digium adapters.
My Toshiba e755 running a VOIP softphone works as an extension as well.
I subscribe to an internet phone service that allows my PDA to make calls via wi-fi.
The future is now.
My office has a state of the art VoIP system from a manufacture who is generally regarded as an industry benchmark.
Caveat Emptor!
We also have enviable amounts of connectivity.
Latency, well don't expect to be able to effectively participate in conference calls. By the time what you've said makes it to the bridge, no one cares.
Echo cancellation, sometimes, mostly bad and unreliable.
Features, sometimes.
Convergence, not really, only on the transport side.
Reboots, oh yes the whole office at one. Everyone's calls dropped in unison.
I would prefer a POTS line please.
I want my PSTN.
nothing here, move along
Then there's the service side. Plenty of "little telcomm companies" (to management eyes this also means unreliable and/or fly-by-night) are starting to sell Voice over IP trunk services. You don't need one with the other, but nobody selling you something wants to make that clear.
Basically, the "commercial" side of the business is hiding behind the complexity, while the "open" side of the business doesn't have enough press to make a dent in the mind of the pointy haired bosses that actually make these decisions.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
I got a new setup, bought some Cisco 7960 SIP phones off eBay, hired an Asterisk pro to do the initial setup since I was on a tight timeline. Use nufone for inbound 800 and outbound LD ($.02/minute both ways). And I love it! Our main office is in New Jersey, we're in SLC, UT. They're just extensions on the phone system. Voicemail works, caller ID works, calls sound the same as normal phones.
We do have 6 analog lines with 2 PCI digium cards, which I would NOT do again. The line charge is more than we would ever spend in 800/local calling. I'm evaluating SIP/IAX softphones now. I think I may be free of the curse of the Nortel PBX forever!!
Costs..? $400 built yerself Linux box with a P4/IDE hard drive. $230 per phone on eBay ($220 for phone (incl shipping) $10 for power supply) *these phones are NICE - Cisco 7960 $1200 for Asterisk pro's time (he should charge more! shhhh) total cost for 10 phone system that has more features and works better than any high end Nortel I've ever spend $50k on, $4k
I'm thinking of setting this up for my house, sinc e nufone has a pay as you go $.02/minute plan.
Oh, and I just found out Asterisk automatically creates report logs in .cvs format! w00t!
Every day I find something new in Asterisk that I love.
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
A decent phone for voip is less than 100 dollars or euros. Asterisk combined with a 500 dollar server and a simple 2 line card AND an internet, can makes calls for free across the world. PABX is not able to make them for free
In addition, their is a heavy penalty by using a standard phone system. It requires a seperate archetecture and management. VOIP is far easier for long-term management.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
how does Asterisk compares to GNU/Bayonne
As anyone installed either software on a large scale ?
On episode 60 of Binary Revolution Radio (about 1.5 months ago) we went into great detail on setting up an asterisk PBX from the ground up. You can listen to it (several times if necessary) and be able to set up your own PBX for next to nothing! We have done this and proven that it works and gives immeasurable control to users and huge savings for businesses. - http://www.binrev.com/radio/archive.html
--- The revolution will be digitized! - http://www.binrev.com/ ---
Your grandpa never said, "Phones will be down for 30 minutes while I reboot!"
Ubiquity and Dynamicsoft have SIP Servlet containers implementing the spec; there's also a reference implementation here to play with.
C'mon... a traditional PBX can't compete with a VoIP PBX for $40.
http://www.digitnetworks.com/
is not going away any time soon. A good example is the University of Michigan which has run a large on-campus phone system for many years. http://www.itcom.itcs.umich.edu/telephone/about.ht ml They do have some VoIP service.
It is interesting to note that most students on campus (Ann Arbor) are going to 7 digit dialing (565 exchange) and that service at U Hospital is going over to SBC.
It will work ok if the last mile connection is good. The bottom line is that to handle high volume traffic the underlying protocol needs QoS intrinsic to the protocol. TCP/IP doesn't.
:-)
TCP/IP is a "best effort" protocol. As long as there is enough bandwidth, your ok most of the time. It gets expensive to have that much headroom of bandwidth. The issue is being addressed, however it still is going to be a bandage.
You couldn't have picked a worse protocol for real time traffic except maybe X.25
VoIP's main benefit as a PBX is to the vendors, who need something new to sell. I lived through the last really big PBX migration. The first stage was when computerized PBXs came out (mid-1970s). AT&T/Bell didn't sell, they rented, but competitors (called "interconnect companies" in those days) sold. And AT&T had no digital PBX until 1983; its previous flagship, Dimension, was analog. Having a CPU in lieu of relays did provide for good features, but their competitors (Nortel, Rolm, NEC, Mitel, etc.) actually had digital switching much earlier.
Come the Bell divestiture in 1984, all of the once-tariffed PBXs were left with AT&T-IS, who did NOT want to maintain any remaining mechanical stuff. Either they sold you a new one, or somebody else did. So between 1974 and 1984, pretty much all of the PBX installed base turned over. The last analog Dimensions were mostly pulled around 1994, when interchangeable area codes (e.g., 270, 978) came in, and Lucent didn't want to rewrite the software. That replacement cycle was beneficial all around, because the new digital PBXs were a lot better, not to mention a lot cheaper to maintain than their predecessors.
But once you had a digital PBX, why upgrade? Fact is, they still work just fine! A 1995-vintage PBX can take digital trunk interfaces (T1/PRI), digital feature phones with displays and multi-line support, and all sorts of neat features. Administration's a breeze too -- your basic telecom manager wants centralized control, to type in office moves into a terminal, not to have people carry phones around with them!
Not that VoIP enables such features even if you want them. Nortel introduced "Automatic Station Relocation" in 1983! If the manager enabled it (hah!), then the user could dial a feature code, pick up their phone, plug it in the new jack, dial a code, and voila, their line was moved. VoIP advocates think this stuff is new! Okay, so the PBX reads the MAC address out of the phone instead of needing a code to be dialed. But management still probably doesn't want them to move it on their own!
So the PBX vendors are looking for a way to force turnover of otherwise perfectly-good kit. The price of new conventional PBX gear is pretty low already; industrial-strength (not Asterix) VoIP PBXs aren't a great bargain. Telling people that the old PBX is obsolete, and they need VoIP, or they won't be k3wl and 1337, is a marketing technique. But that doesn't make it so.
Digium support, do you mean hardware, or Asterisk? Asterisk support, I would liken to the quality support you can get for Slackware or Debian... There's a great community of dedicated volunteers out there, and a few specialists out to make a living - but the really complex problems, you need to get around on your own.
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
This statement makes no sense:
"Of course, true VoIP will only be possible with a migration to IPv6. There are simply too many phone numbers, which would need an IP address, to use IPv4."
In order to have any range of VoIP services, you need as many IP addresses as your network has. I.E. one. Now I'll admit I'm no expert on VoIP, but routing of VoIP is no different than routing any other data on your network. Most large business have subnets with internal IP addresses which reroute to one hub that goes to the internet. VoIP simply uses existing internet and network technology.
Besides, for home technology, both Verizon and Comcast are already using IPv6. Using my Vonage system, I can have have as many virtual phone numbers as I want, set up multiple devices, such as faxes, with their own numbers, and still only need one IP address.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
No this is not a pr0n comment.
Verizon and Qwest are offering "Naked" DSL offerings. I.E. DSL with no phone required. However, you often need to call into their sales department and ask for it specifically, no online ordering or anything like that. They don't advertise it but at least you can get it.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Relatedly, the data/IT guys don't want us "dinosaurs" working on their equipment to get cross-trained. It is a really lousy situation for me as I still have a long time left in the telecom industry. I shouldn't be penalized by not being allowed to get cross trained on VoIP products/services.
Fortunately I was pissed off enough to go out on my own and get CCNA certified using vacation time and paid out of pocket for boot camp style training. I will not be left in the dust because my coworkers are too proud to learn/adapt to where the industry is going.
On a lighter note, now I need to find an entry level VoIP job to get started in the field....
Well, actually IBM preferred to call it a CBX but it's still a PBX none the less...
I personally own this beasty, a 12 node ROLM, capable of handling 10,000 phone lines. Anyone tired of small town phone company hassles? Start your own phone company...
Remember all our mobile phones are software and do use digital audio . You don't call them unreliable, do you ?.
Given that one of the largest wireless vendors claims reliability as a selling point must indicate to you the level of reliability generally associated with mobile phones.
(Admittedly this has more to do with their wireless nature, but still..)
(No idea how the first post was offtopic)
Will VoIP Kill the PBX?
Did the car kill the horse and buggy?
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77 77 77 2e 6d 65 6c 76 69 6e 73 2e 63 6f 6d
There are major differences between VOIP, IP Telephony, Internet Telephony, and packet carrier. These terms can't be used interchangably!
Avaya doesn't know IPT, not enough, not even their 8700, sorry but it's true. They will sell you whatever they can talk you into buying, DON'T BUY THEIR IP SYSTEMS!
Asterisk is an awesome system that has come a LONG way, I really look forward to when I can carve out a living with it. I just can't today the budgets are in Cisco because of it's scale, support, and maturity. (REAL IP phreaks can laugh along with me, but it's basically true.)
mod away, I feel much better.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/07/1 427232
Did video kill the radio star?
newest Avaya PBX (e.g. 8700) all run on Linux. Red-Hat to be exact.
old version of voice mail Audix runs on Novell UNIXware (forgot the real name). It's 386-UNIX anyway. New version of Avaya voice mail is Intuity Audix, runs on Linux. More info.: support.avaya.com
You might feel better, but you look pretty bad after that incoherent, insulting outburst. Those terms you rattled off are nested subsets: packet carrier / Internet Telephony / IP Telephony / VoIP. Do you specifically disagree with my post, to which you replied, stating that you can't control your PBX with servlets? Or a reason to denigrate the architecture of Tomcat servlets controlling Asterisk? Or are you posting your venom about Avaya in the wrong subthread?
--
make install -not war
Sure, it's just Slashdot after all ;). And thanks for recognizing my FP, which I had the class not to (although others posted purely-FP drivel before me).
So with your perspective, perhaps you have some insight into the question I posted in another subthread: do you know of examples of servlets running as the application behind/atop an Asterisk server? Or any other (Vo)IP PBX software, especially open source?
--
make install -not war
Obviously "phones will be going down for a reboot" is totally unacceptable. But you already knew that.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
The savings depends a lot on your calling patterns - are you making enough IP calls to justify the cost of the hardware you need? You can save money if you're making lots of calls between your locations (especially international locations), or if you're using a VOIP phone company that lets you deliver calls to a VOIP-to-Telco gateway, but if your calling patterns aren't right, you might not be able to justify the hardware cost unless you needed to buy a new PBX anyway (in which case it'll probably be VOIP.) Alternatively, you can save money on long distance calls by telling your long distance company sales rep that the X cents/minute rate they're charging you is laughably high in today's market and you can get a better price buying phone cards at the 7-11, and have them grumble and cut your price yet again.
Disclaimer: I work for a large telecommunications company which can sell you any of these services or hardware, so we make depressingly thin margins regardless of which option you take, and no, this isn't an official company position, it's just my opinion.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The big problem for the Feds is that VOIP is structured fundamentally differently than traditional phone switching. Call setup uses servers, which can be run by anybody in the world (but are usually run by a company's internal telecom department for IP PBXs, by a VOIP-to-telco gateway company for many commercial VOIP services, or by software companies with ill-defined business models or popular Instant Messaging services with proprietary protocols), and the voice channel of the call is carried separately on whatever IP networks connect the callers, which may not be under the control of the gatekeeper (call setup server) providers. There are two fun places to hack this kind of communications - VOIP-to-telco gateways (where you can tap the telco side using traditional methods, but you have to bully the VOIP provider into giving you call detail records for the IP side, which is much tougher in the decentralized VOIP world than in traditional telcos), and in the call setup gatekeepers themselves, which can tell the callers to set up the call through an unexpected conference bridge service instead of directly (since the caller's VOIP software is designed to believe that sort of request and wouldn't have an easy way to check it if didn't trust the gatekeeper.) The latter obviously requires hacking the gatekeeper, which is even harder to do in some environments, since it's possible to use a service with distributed gatekeepers that might not even be in the jurisdiction of the cops who want to wiretap you.
Disclaimer time: I work for a large telecom company, and the following is strictly my personal opinion, not theirs: I work for a large telecom company, so the rules about obeying wiretap orders appear to apply when we're providing managed VOIP services for customers. But if a router or PBX vendor wants to sell hardware to a customer, that hardware doesn't need to have wiretapping service built in, and if the hardware vendor wants to sell management services for the hardware, they're not a telecom company so wiretapping rules don't appear to apply to them (unless the government thinks up some new rules.) From a competitive standpoint, this is really really annoying, especially because as a civil libertarian, I think wiretapping is wrong and rude and often done illegally, and a huge amount of CALEA and followon laws and regulations seems to be designed to make massive-scale illegal or at least unsupervised wiretapping easy.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If your PBX appears too dumb to do that, it's probably because that's an "extra value-added application feature" that's not in the application package you bought, though real difference is probably whether the user interface menu items are enabled or disabled rather than whether the API behind it works.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks