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Start Your Own Open Source-Based Telecom
prostoalex writes "George Ou shows how with the help of open-source VOIP server Asterisk you can start your own telecommunications company for under $6000 '...you can build a phone system that can support 72 analog telephones or fax machines, 100 IP hard or soft phones on site or remote, a T1 line to the public telco for 23 simultaneous external PSTN connections, multiple IP-based IAX trunks to multiple remote offices for seamless toll-bypass 4-digit dialing, IVR, and almost unlimited voice mail for everyone - for under $6,000 in a 1U chassis. Such a price point is easily 10 or more times cheaper than a commercial alternative,' writes George."
you discover that office class IP telephones are expensive as all hell.
we went with a NEC digital phone system with 2 wic cards for T1's incoming. the CSU cost us $12,000.00 but the Phones are only $185.00 each.
phones of the same quality in IP phones are neat $350.00 each, and that adds up fast when you look at around 100 phones plus 2 smaller CSU's that are set up as virtual offices at the ends of other T-1' for the sattelite offices with analog fallback if the connected T-1's fail plus allow us to bypass long distance charges by using least cost routing.
dont get me wrong, but an asterisk solution to replace what i just bought would be close in price and require a few weeks to get it working. I simply pay the local company to install it and maintain it.
here at work on a test machine, and at home on my XBOX! It's really incredible all the features that are available in Asterisk. Once you get the hang of the configs.. and there's probably only 3-4 configs you will mess with, it's a breeze. I have call routing rules setup to call my house phone, if I don't answer in so many seconds, it will dial out to my cell phone. Someone has also written a bluetooth presence script so it knows when your at your desk ( as long as the server is near your desk ) and when your gone so it knows which phone to call. Pretty slick. Not only is Asterisk been fun to play with, I've learned tons about telecom that I didn't know before.
We have done a similar thing with our Asterisk phone server, in that we allow our customers to check the status of their order through our phone system.
It turned out to be incredibly easy, using a php console script through asterisk AGI and festival to read back the customers tracking number.
We also have our fax machine configured to fax a document to an e-mail address, if it's sent to that persons extension number. We have all incoming external fax's now going directly to e-mail to save on paper, which makes junk fax far less offensive and costly.
It really blew my bosses mind when I added an extention via an IAXy device going to my own home. It will now be used when the boss is on business trips, so that he has access to his phone extension in almost any hotel room. (all it needs in a dhcp enabled network)
I can't think of a better phone system for an office environment than Asterisk.
I keep trying to convince my own bosses, to convince their bosses to offer IPv6, as a special package, only to the slashdot-type crowd. (Certainly don't want to support it with the "my win98 no worky" customers). No one takes it seriously.
I do wonder if we'd make the front page here, being the first US company to offer true IPv6 broadband. Would anyone care, would any of you guys sign up, just for that reason alone?
My company is considering the Avaya IP Office Small Office Edition standalone VoIP system. It's basically a box the size of a small router or other piece of network hardware + (I believe) an external computer/server that runs the voicemail storage.
I saw the product demonstrated at a local vendor and found it to be rather impressive -- move phones around, customize voicemail prompts/forwarding, conferencing, etc. And it was all inclusive in this box. The add-ons included analog device plug-in cards, a pro version of the IP software to allow phone control from computers, etc. I'm getting pricing later this week on the system.
My question is -- is Asterisk secured/encrypted like a proprietary system? Like Avaya IP Office? One of the bigs things we were told is the security of the calls from the system vs. other, more open standards VoIP systems.
Just curious.
IronChefMorimoto
I RTFA and I think I understand all of the components -- there's one thing I'm not sure I get:
Once you've got this system set up, where is the connection to POTS? How do you make calls to / receive calls from the normal old circuit-switched phone network?
If the answer is that you pay for this service from your telco (or other VOIP gateway provider), then you aren't really starting your own telco, are you?
Can to give some insight on some of the hidden costs that were not mentioned?
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
I have an asterisk server setup to serve myself, and have commercial hard phone access. Can we get an estimate on the maintenance cost? Businesses don't want to leave the blame on themselves. I definitely see the boom in your normal ISP serving up voip, but I don't see your local tech company serving up its own voip. Asterisk isn't a tough setup, but asterisk isn't the only thing needing setup. I think security might want to take a chunk out of the costs.
If asterisk servers end up being the new hip tool, I'm ready for the next hip hack, Asterisk war driving. Wireless access at these "affordable" technology companies and "affordable" voip access gives way to free phone calls for sniffers. So we've "war driven" bluetooth, wifi, netcams, security cams; oh ya, I'm ready for voip. Come to think of it, take a stroll within a few feet of my apartment and have a phone call. Access is free!!
I'm also a college student without a life. So maybe I'm being a bit tough on the security end, but even though everyone is different, I'm sure I'm not the only curious kid.
While I will agree with you that at some point trying to turn an asterix system into a full-fledged telecom company would take more than the $6000 mentioned in the article, it would be a good start.
Also, just like many medium to large business use a PBX for substantial savings, you could put a system like this into a block of downtown businesses and help to share the cost for connecting to commercial telecom providors... in effect becoming your own telecom.
The #1 problem would not be the technical side of things, which Asterix would certainly help with, but with the legal side of trying to start a telecom. Registering with the local public utility board and getting compliance with the whole host of regulations that come from trying to become a telephone company would probably be your undoing.
But if you are a high school aged kid that wants to do a little better than the old tin can between the treehouse and his bedroom, you can indeed run some CAT-5 cable from your house to a neighbor and "wire up" your neighborhood as your own private telephone company... and even use regular telephones. This is something that would have been impossible to do back when I was in high school under the old Ma Bell equipment providors. I think it would be a fun project, and even include some wireless access points to help cross streets in a private phone network. You might even pick up a girlfriend (by offering free telephone service for her and her friends).
I have been doing just this very thing for the last year and a half. And let me tell you, it is NOT as easy as it would first seem. You really need a huge amount of capital to make this work.
I tried to self-bootstrap an asterisk based telco as my PRIMARY business supplimented with general Linux consulting with more than just $6k in the bank.
Here are some of the difficulties I have run into (and solved, but like I said, it has been a long, hard, expensive road):
1. The technology is COMPLICATED. This means inherently less reliable and big learning curve.
2. Asterisk is still unstable (even the stable version). A bug due to a completely untested patch added to the latest stable made me look like an idiot in front of a customer.
3. Standards are lacking. Asterisk often does not support all of the features of many voip phones. What do I tell a customer when there are buttons on their phones that don't do anything?
4. Asterisk has no billing system built in. Not a fault of asterisk but you can count on having to write your own. There are no existing open sources systems because they are everyones bread and butter. Nobody is giving theirs up so you can use it to compete against them.
5. Asterisk has no nice end user interface. Again, no real fault of asterisk but you can count on investing in LOTS of developer time. Asterisk configuration is complicated and to make an extensive interface is bound to be very costly.
6. I have had some bad luck with hardware from Digium. I am willing to chalk that up to bad luck. But the support from Digium is just unusable. I have left a dozen phone messages. Never once got a call back. I had to RMA a part that failed in production after just a few days of use. Yes, we tested the phone system etc and it all looked good. Then a daughterboard on the TDM400P (4 port FXO card) started causing the whole card to fail intermittantly. It took a lot of head scratching and days of calling digium, waiting on hold, eventually ending up in their voicemail box, leaving a message, and waiting for callbacks which never came to actually track down the cause of this intermittant problem. I originally started talking to them on Dec 17 regarding this. They suggested that the card was sharing interrupts and this was the reason it did not play well. On the 21st they said they had seen this problem before. On the 28th they admitted it was a hardware design flaw and offer to RMA the card. Why did they tell me to check shared interrupts then and waste a week of my time? I don't know. Around this time we find out that unloading the driver and reloading it would temporarily fix it but this had to be done on average twice a day. Note that the system is now in production. Worst possible case. So they are going to ship me a new card and I can send back the old card while we keep rebooting the system/reloading the driver on average twice a day. On the 29th very early in the AM I replied to their email with all of the info they need to ship me a new card and I expressed an extreme sense of urgency hoping the card would be overnighted the same day. On the 30th they emailed me an RMA number. I was told I could expect tracking info any minute. A couple days go by with no word from Digium. On January 4th I get an email telling me the card is on backorder! They expect more cards in on the 6th. So I on the 6th I email them to check if it had been shipped because I still had no tracking info and no card had arrived. This has all been interspersed with many phonecalls which were never returned btw. I am only citing emails because I have a record of them. On or about the 10th I call to see what the status is. The shipping personis not available but the operator promises he will call me back the same day wth some info. No phone call. On the 11th (yesterday, as I write this) I call again and explain I did not get a phone call. They are very apologetic and put me on hold while they look into it. After a few minutes I am informed that the card was never shipped! They promis
a) Big company with a trained staff and warehouse full of warranty/replacement parts.
b) The guy who put it together over two weeks while reading a HOWTO.
c) Nobody, and your business misses a week of calls while guy from (b) tries to figure out what happened.
This is so funny!
I used to work for a major telco deploying/configuring cell backhaul ATM equipment and your post reminds me of a deployment in Pensacola, FL.
b) The guys running the fiber at the new facility cut the pair 1' short, so they wouldn't reach if strung thru the runs. The only way to make them reach was to string them tight, about neck high across the facility.
Everything -- except the ATM switch I was programming -- was on battery-backed power. Of course there was a storm and we lost power 3 times that night.
The big telco had sold their fiber making plant a couple of months ago. Part of the agreement was that said telco would purchase fiber ONLY thru the new company for the next year.
Said company was OUT OF STOCK on the fiber we needed and it would take FOUR WEEKS to get some made and shipped. It was a violation of the contract to get some anywhere else. I finally had some expressed from one of the telco's European warehouses -- which counted as 'stock'.
a) The cell crew that was recently hired to replace the experienced, but much more expensive, crew that was recently laid off. This was the crew that screwed up the fiber and redundant power to begin with.
c) Customers in Pensacola, FL and Mobile, AL who had to wait an extra week for the new towers to go online while this shit was fixed.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the THREE HOUR, 13 PERSON conference call that was had to discuss how to handle peak/non-peak billing charges when a user crosses time zones.
All from two of the biggest names in the business.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.