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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 $6,000 in a 1U chassis. Such a price point is easily 10 or more times cheaper than a commercial alternative,' writes George."
100 IP hard or soft phones on site or remote
... 100 IP hard or soft porn sites ...
For a moment I thought that read
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
They dropped their prices a few months ago; it shouldn't be 30$ a month now!
What I want is to be able to setup my own cell phone tower* that funnels my "cell phone" calls over voip.
mah-Bell
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
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 $350.00 each, and that adds up fast when you look at around 100 phones plus 2 smaller CSU's that are set up as virtual offices at the ends of other T-1' for the sattelite offices with analog fallback if the connected T-1's fail plus allow us to bypass long distance charges by using least cost routing.
dont get me wrong, but an asterisk solution to replace what i just bought would be close in price and require a few weeks to get it working. I simply pay the local company to install it and maintain it.
Mod -1, Arrogant
here at work on a test machine, and at home on my XBOX! It's really incredible all the features that are available in Asterisk. Once you get the hang of the configs.. and there's probably only 3-4 configs you will mess with, it's a breeze. I have call routing rules setup to call my house phone, if I don't answer in so many seconds, it will dial out to my cell phone. Someone has also written a bluetooth presence script so it knows when your at your desk ( as long as the server is near your desk ) and when your gone so it knows which phone to call. Pretty slick. Not only is Asterisk been fun to play with, I've learned tons about telecom that I didn't know before.
There are so many ISPs right now that are just a step or two away from doing this. The company I work for has been promoting the use of Vonage with our high speed wireless to get away from using a land land with the phone company. And since Vonage came up with a WiFi phone our customers would be able to use it anywhere there is one of our hotspots.
Most of the information that I have seen on VoIP has pointed to the fact that this could happen soon. Our customers have been yelling about this for months now.
They dropped their prices a few months ago; it shouldn't be 30$ a month now!
must resist urge to rule world with iron fist ...
What I want is to be able to setup my own cell phone tower* that funnels my "cell phone" calls over voip.
Check your local zoning rules. You may find the following:
NIMBY -- Your neighbors don't want that sh!t in their own back yard
Your same neighbors would be only too happy to buy in if you undercut the prices of the telcos (but they'll still be NIMBY)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's nice to see such an impressive setup for such a low price, but to "start your own telco" for real, you'd need a bit more I think:
- Billing and invoicing software
- Provisions for wiretaps (if mandated by your local gov't)
- Customer service (unless you're not going to provide any)
etc.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I think you're missing the scale here, this wouldn't be for J Random HomeUser and a single line.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Too bad you don't have the Testicular Fortitude to post as a logged in user.
And so I expect this person to support and manage the system 24/7. There are other costs involved, not just turn it on and walk away.
We have a few PRIs in some locales which is nice for PSTN termination, but for the most part, we've got an excellent service and we mostly use it for conference calling. We regularly do several hundred hours of conference calling, and the flexability of each user having their own extension is nice.
We've considered reselling the service, since it would be fairly easy to do, just record some custom IVRs and take those CDRs out of the sql backend and bill them. These things may actually happen, or not.. but th ease in setting up the system and making it work through the power of Asterisk is great. I love it and am using it to operate my home lines as well.
I work for a moderate sized telephony services provider, and I can attest that getting above the single T1 "toy" deployment written about here gets really, really hard. The Digium cards are crap, there's very little documentation, and if you try and run multiple carriers then have fun. In a few years this stuff might be pretty decent, and for small office deployments its great, but other than that it is ass.
Who's going to have it fixed within 24 hours?
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 reminds me of a story about Steve Wozniak that might not be true. I was told by a lineman once that Wozniak had perfected his blue box and hooked it up to a switch board in his attic. He supposedly charged a flat rate free to his neighbors for the ability to dial into his switch board and dial out long distance using the blue box.
All I could dig up was this. The lineman could have been yanking my chain. Comments appreciated.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
We just did a VOIP implementation at work this last summer, and while we did not go with asterix, we did get a pretty good price (went with shoretel). However, the biggest single cost of all, was not the T1 installation, or the servers, or the software, it was replacing phones. Replacing 65 phones at our company at about $280 each was a pretty penny. Of course, with asterix you can find relatively cheap SIP phones, but they don't have all the fancy features, LCD's, that make it easy to use, POE, etc. So a hint for all you thinking of looking at VOIP, look at 3 very important things:
1. Yearly costs (maint, support, etc)
2. Upgrade costs. (how much is it to add each additional person. ie. phone+system capacity+licencing+anything else)
3. purchase costs ( for everything, T1 installation, installers, etc)
Look in that order. Many are cheap up front, but their phones are proprietary and cost a fortune, or can't expand in the chassis.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Check out the Sipura SPA-841 ($90. at voxilla.com, etc.). That is MUCH BETTER than the Fujitsu 'office-class' overpriced phones in common use in my 1000-line office.
I'm setting up Asterisk right now for use in our small office. Actually, it's basically setup now and I'm just waiting for my phones to get here.
;)
.. but then you'd have to dial it like an external number, and the other office wouldn't be able to call an extension directly).
Total cost for the hardware was under CDN$2000 (8 phones, 2-port fxs adapter for analog phones/fax machines, 4-port fxo card for incoming lines, and the PC). I probably spent about 40 hours total after deciding to use asterisk learning about it, configuring everything, and testing. Even at billable $60/hr, that works to $4400, which is a lot less than a comparable commercial system (I got quotes). It didn't actually cost that much anyways, since I don't get paid $60/hr.
We now have a phone system that has an IVR menu, pratically unlimited voicemail, and every other feature you'd expect in a phone system, plus when we open a branch office later this year I can use VoIP trunks to make intra-office calls pretty much free (and easy - encouraging communication between offices).
The system we have now is getting old, to add voicemail to it is $3000 by itself, plus the time to configure it (actually, I'd probably have to get someone to come in and set it up, since I only know the basics of how to program a few features). It can't do VoIP at all (unless you were to plug something into a CO port
This hasn't even gotten into the advanced stuff I can do fairly easily that wouldn't be possible with another system (without spend a LOT of money) -- such as, IVR status updates on system status; allowing customers to query their account balance etc.
Speak before you think
I've been looking at deploying a similar system in an office I work with. As far as I can see, the main advantage is thus:
I can take calls in, on a London number, have them handled by someone in the office, who puts them through to someone just like she normally does and they go to that employee at home. Provided he/she has broadband at home, no extra cost. Brilliant. It's not going to cost us $6000 to implement, more like $300/phone and $500 for the server, we don't need a system of the scale demonstrated, and should make the money back.
Not to mention, pretty cool!
total bullshite. The T1/E1 cards are great. I run a bunch of Asterisk boxes worldwide, using these cards. Never a problem.
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 work in telecom. I find the 6 grand price tag humorous. If you want a soft PBX (which has been done in the past, with mixed results), by all means go for it. You can converge IP with telephony so you will require multi disciplined support staff to keep it running. But don't think even for a moment that you can set up your own phone service provider for $6000. Try multiplying it by 10 and that will be a good start. Then keep dumping money into it for the next 2 years because you sure as hell won't be making a profit until you reach critical mass, AND learn how to balance userbase vs hardlines.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Lemme get this straight: for just $6,000, I can start my own telecom, just like the big boys? I can bleed millions of dollars in red ink and employ mindless unionized drones who provide horrendous customer service while simultaneously driving my customers away? I can run miles of fiber through the neighborhood only to provide people with 384k upload speeds?
Wow, where do I sign up?
What's your damage, Heather?
This isn't a way to start your own telecom. There's no means of interfacing with the system at large other than by buying the services of an existing telecom at regular commercial rates. You can't, for example, realistically offer me and fifty of my random neighbors cheaper phone service in our houses with this. This is simply a way to build a PBX-type phone system that can inexpensively serve more than one physical location over an IP network. Timothy apparently doesn't understand the difference between being a telecommunications provider and simply owning a PBX or key system.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
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?
IIRC, doesn't Asterisk let you use any ASDI phone? As such, there should be lots of nice cheap phones you can use (such as the ones specifically recommended by Digium). You need to make sure you can get the programming codes for the phones you buy, but that isn't as difficult as it once was.
-- sudo.ca
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
Hmmm maybe some one here more knowledgeable than I about voip will be able to answer this question. I own a multi-family dwelling, and I have a business class internet connection which I share with the other people living in the house. If we each got our own voip adapter (I am thinking the Linksys Vonage adapter) could we all use them and have our own individual phone lines? Or another way of saying this is "can I have 5 voip adapters behind a NAT router" and still have them work?
Of all the things I miss
...but the point still stands well. This is cheap and works. At this price point, paying for a second setup would still be effective.
Before you can run a successfully inept business you have to attend a MBA-mill and get your business speak about you.
And then you can synergize the process and run it into the ground while taking millions in bonuses every time you fart or something...[nortel...]
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Well, there's this thing called "support". Initial costs may be low, but how about ongoing maintenance costs? Redundancy? Failure rates?
http://ruk.ca/code/amazon.pl
Perhaps the mods were right and you were trying to be funny, but I'd hate for others to think that you were performing rocket science with your mad coding skillz.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
I'd sign up with comcast for IPv6, provided I got my own static IP block. As it is now, I tend to be a DSL guy, because:
;)
:)
a) I don't like sharing my bandwidth with the entire neighbourhood without my own traffic-shaping in place
b) DSL works when the power goes out. What good are UPS's if you can't stay online?
If you guys offered me IPv6 with static IP's, I'd go with you in a heartbeat. (at least until Verizon brings FIOS to my town
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?
Now all I need is a cell phone that'll switch between VOIP whenever a WAP is available and regular old cell service when one isn't. I wouldn't expect a cell provider to stand for such a thing, so that'd probably end up having to be a roll-your-own project.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You would be *very* surprised that with proper monitoring, you really can turn it on and walk away.
I run asterisk in a corporate environment where it supports ~120 office employees (local and remote), 2 PRI's, extensive IVR menus, robust voicemail for each employee and also custom scripts which handle meeting scheduling where the system calls YOU when your meeting time is up.
Turning it on and walking away from it has been handled nicely from the software side. It's the hardware side YOU need to take care of.
Nah, most people (and when I say 'most people', I mean 'all people') are using their VoIP phones behind a router.
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.
If you're running a local service, it might not be too difficult, but if you're tapping into a wholesalier network for long distance, determining who gets billed what can be a nightmare. This is it might be a good idea to use a clearing house- they take care of all the out-of-local-network billing issues, and send you a bill for the cost. You in turn, bill your customers based on whatever arrangement you have set up. Also, don't forget that as traffic increases, you might have need for other components, like gatekeepers. If you want to provide reliable service, you'll want to double up on everything so that you'll have a failover plan if your primary goes down. This will definitely add some to the cost.
Actually, my email is comcast only because im at 21,000ft from the CO. I work for a DSL provider, that hates Verizon pretty vehemently.
We already offer static IP, none of the PPPoE shit that everyone else does. With IPv6, I can imagine handing every customer their own block of v6 (though probably only 1 IPv4 addr). We could truly make it a "no support" service, as in if Joe Sixpack calls up asking for help "configurating his PI version 6 addremess", we say "sorry, we don't support that". (Though, a clueful user reporting a loss of connectivity or routing issues would get support with that).
I know that at least some of the web is accessible, and there are supposedly several EFnet servers you can reach with IPv6. Don't know how useful it would be, but just bragging rights alone have to be worth something, right?
Isn't there something about a Telco/Phone Provider being required to provide uptime 99.999% of the time throughout the year? Meaning a phone company is only allowed to be down for like, a few minutes a year tops? That was what we were always told at the last ISP turn ISP/Telco a year or so ago. Of course, they were up maybe 85% of the time throughout the year (although they were new and I think their customers understood that it was kind of in "beta" stage)
My Xbox Live Gamer Card
hell yah - sign me up!
there's some fellows I work with that would be hella interested
Good little system, I wonder how pricing compares to Asterisk?
...I know that at least some of the web is accessible, and there are supposedly several EFnet servers you can reach with IPv6.. Wanta explain that one? An IPv6 TCP/IP stack or IP v6 Web address won't work with IPv4 on the Internet routers. However, IPv6 is backward compatiable. Perhaps you happened to hit some routers that can handle v6 over v4 with tunneling. (See http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/759/ipj_3-1/ipj_3 -1_routing.html)
He couldn't have been serious...
Redundancy - of course it's zero (single everything except phones which are useless redundant if you've got no connection). Which means double the cost (HA software and network equipment) to failover the services...
To me it seems okay for a small-to-mid size office or niche ISP (village/island/etc.).
One thing that bugs me about voip is the latency. It deadens the conversation and often leads to collisions between 2 people speaking. QOS in routers can probably solve this problem in the future, but for now there is not much one can.
I set up an asterisk box about 2 weeks ago, configured it to peer with about 10 different voip providers, and have been testing/logging one way and round trip latency.
A typical land line can experience between 60-90ms of latency. I found that latency on voip lines range from 90-250m (IAX2,ulaw codec, optonline cable modem service). We also did a test using 2 Skype clients (both on optonline's network). The latency was about 280ms.
I will be posting results on the voip-info.org wiki soon.
~Rolan
Portions of the internet are themselves capable of doing IPv6 routing, or so I thought. Some of the dns rootservers are accessible via IPv6, and have AAAA records. Those domains with AAAA records are themselves accessible via IPv6, some being webservers, others being (at least one) efnet irc server.
Or so I thought. I may be wrong on any of all of the previous though. It still doesn't seem like I'm imagining it when I thought I read that at least a few backbones were routing IPv6.
Probably not representative of public access seeings how we have special arrangements with them. They provide us with lots of free services in exchange for a skybox at our auction.
Couldn't help it:
When running Asterisk in Soviet Russia, the TELEPHONE CALLS YOU!
-j
I'm looking for a way to use a bluetooth headset with my laptop to make voip calls both inside my house and from hotels with broadband. I'd like line 2 to ring at my laptop no matter where I am, and can run a Linux vmware guest on the laptop to fill any connectivity gaps. Can this be done with asterisk and a linejack card at home and some kind of utility on a linux vm guest?
Intelligent Life on Earth
Unless you are hooked onto a V6 network (there are a few like 6Bone) you can't get to a V6 ONLY address. V6 sites are listed at ipv6.org. Try your research again and let me know what happens. Maybe your ISP is one of the few who ARE on a V6 network.
We have 5 Cisco 7940's, 2 Cisco 7960's,
a TMD400 with 4 fxo cards, a T100P (t1 card)
running on a compaq proliant 3000.
Our total cost was less than $3000 including the phones.
Anyone care to predict what monthly national unlimited IP service is going to cost (not including access/bandwidth) in 5 years?
My bet is free. (Not just for p2p Skype style technology, but for conventional VOIP).
The revenue here is going to be on international and other network-out billables. (not to mention a very small amount of ad revenue from web interface impressions).
Vonage and others are going to get destroyed by whoever goes free first: GooglePhone, HotmailVoice, etc.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Daryll Strauss will be presenting on this topic at SCALE 3x. His seminar "Open Source Telephony Using Asterisk and VOIP" will will approach Asterisk and VOIP from the ground up. It starts with an introduction to the technology and terminology used in telephony. It will point out some examples of the technology that can be used. Once the base is established, the talk will move on to describe some typical telephony applications and show how Asterisk and VOIP can be used to solve them.
There will also be a panel on "The Future of VoIP and Open Source". With speakers from Vonage, SIPphone and others.
If you want to check out the exhibit hall you can get a free pass with the promo code "free". For a discounted full access pass use the promo code "NEWSP".
Here ya go...a pic of gnophone:
http://www.gnophone.com/images/gnophoneshot.jpg
From the gnophone page:
Gnophone is an open source internet telephone that allows you to make calls to other GnoPhone users or to an Asterisk PBX Gateway.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
His message applies to payed solutions to. Why is this relevant? If you have to cover your ass all the time, why are you breathing air?
(I'm not associated with Musimi, just a happy user.)
I'm in a Unix state of mind.
We run a FreeBSD shop, and would rather stick to our usual rather than include a Linux box on the network. Has anyone had any luck with this? Will it run at all on non linux unix systems?
I know its karma doom, but I'd rather not run Linux.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
I just started reading about this and wondered...what about phone numbers? Is there one number and then you have to assign extensions? What about dialing out lines? How do actual numbers play in? I am new to this. Any help app.
Ah ah ahchoo,
sorry, I'm alergic to bullsht.
We've got our asterisk pxb connecting to various databases from various major vendors. It's not that hard, and the parent poster is overrating him/her self.
It works pretty much exactly like a normal phone system, everyone has a cisco 7960 VoiP phone plugged into their ethernet port and their computer plugged into the phone, or a switch on their desk for both. People get extensions, and dial 9 to get out, voicemail system sends you an email with a .wav file (surprisingly small). My phone rings and it's homer simpson saying "I wasn't asleep"... errr or a non-copyright version of someone that sounds like homer simpson...
The system is easy to configure (pay someone to do it initially), easy to monitor, and very powerful and flexible.
We are in Utah, have a 1.5MB DSL and a VPN to our NJ office, and they're just more extensions on the phone system.
We have had a couple problems with Asterisk, our PCI cards are sharing IRQ's and I need to fix that to rid us of a weird beeping.
Also, someone from NJ calling out gets bad calls when we're downloading stuff, We've got a QoS router, but it needs more tweaking.. if only there were 2 of me...
I've used nortel and Intellisomethin pbx's and have always hated them. I love asterisk, and have no plans to return to $20,000 pile of crap windows NT floppy disk everything is $500 extra and technical help is $200/hr phone systems again!
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
It takes a bit more to get your head around some of the configuration items, but once you grasp a few basic concepts, it is incredibly flexible, and extremely powerful.
One of the nice touches is a wide library of pre-recorded professional phrases. Additionally, you can have custom ones recorded (with something like a 48 hour turnaround), in the same voice, for something like $20 for three recordings. Quite a deal for a very professional office PBX (or mini-telco). (The prerecorded library has some hilarious phrases, recorded in that same professional voice; definitely worth a download of the asterisk source, just to play the .wav's.)
I believe I have heard that Vonage uses Asterisk.
The only problem I have had with the system, is occasionally with Digium's cards an extension will get "stupid" (no dial tone, just static); from what I have read, some reshuffling of interrupts (Digium cards like having their own interrupt), and getting a slightly more modern motherboard (mine is '98), would help this problem. It occurs fairly rarely.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
... unless Apple (computers) beats Apple (record company) and ends up owning that song, how's it go ...
....
...
.... something or other
Michelle
Mah belle
sont des
Infuriate left and right
The televantage system will run fine on a P3 650 box so hardwdare wise its not too bad. Software is where the price becomes comparable. The new system we are implementing allows us to use regular analog phones or realistically anything that can in any wawy connect to the server. Gives us a lot of options. I can operate with all the same functions from my cell phone in an airport, I like that.
don lapres would be selling this for me and i could retire somewhere where it's warm and pleasant all the time and my money would be untouchable by the feds.
Serenity now, insanity later.
There are is so much very lightly used PBX equipment floating around due to business closings etc. You can get a nice Lucent or NEC system for pennies on the dollar for what you would pay new.
Maybe, one day, when I accidently type an IP into a phone, it will actually ring somewhere...
I don't get it.
but you wouldn't be the first. My cable ISP does this.
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
If you want a commercial class VoIP PBX expect to pay about $800 - $1200 per user for hardware, software licenses, and installation. I do this for a living and invariably the final price is right in that range. If you want open source with more support look at Pingtel, although the feature set is not as robust as Asterisk. If you want open SIP standards built on Linux look at Zultys. For a mid size company with multiple offices, a VoIP system can pay for itself fairly quickly when you start bypassing the phone company and doing all your inter-office calls over your WAN. We have clients looking at reducing their annual phone bill by a million dollars or more. We can even do handset to handset encryption (3DES or AES), not that we have any real reason to. It makes a cool customer demo though!
This is the author of the original blog.
I never said anything about "starting your own telecom". The blog that pointed to me said that. Please check the original blog.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/index.php?p=25
Right, ist no real problem to setup an SIP Proxy serving several thousand people, but it IS a problem to get a decent accounting/billing and customer support going! In addition to this you need all systems, including the PSTN Gateways and the in/outgoing T1 Lines redundant which adds quite some $$$ to the budget. And Asterisk is a system designed for beeing used as a company size PBX, NOT as large scale SIP-Proxy. If you really wanna start your own telco you better use the Sip Express Router (SER) from the "Frauenhofer Institut" germany. See http://wwww.ser.org .
You can run a dozen of HA Linux Systems together with a couple of Cisco-Boxes for termination and have it easily managed by 3 persons 24/7. Been there, done that.
I think the idea of IP Telephony is great, until you need to have a system that works 24/7.
Consider that "works" doesn't just apply to your local setup; it also applies to your internet provider.
As an example, yesterday in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware (USA) Verizon's internet service was interrupted. The end result was no internet traffic.
In such a situation, while it's great to have the low cost of IP telephony, how are you going to send or receive calls when you have no internet service?
The traditional telecoms have a very robust physical network, which is independantly powered. Even while internet service was down, Verizon's phone network was still running, without a hiccup.
Take into account the cost of having the same reliability when caluclating the overall cost of an IP telephony system.
And so I expect this person to support and manage the system 24/7. There are other costs involved, not just turn it on and walk away.
For the cost that I've seen some contracts with the Big Guys, you could hire a tech or two to live with the system 24/7. So, if you want to pay a few thousand a month for support, I'm sure you can find someone competent to support it. Counting upgrades, support contracts, and normal maintenance, (but not the install) I've seen phone systems from the Big Guys that cost $50k per year for 200 phones. You tell me if you think that is reasonable and whether you think you could get someone to support a system 24/7 for that. Oh, and if you are wondering, that wasn't even for 24/7 support.
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