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."

Comments

Speed reading...

[mikael]

100 IP hard or soft phones on site or remote

For a moment I thought that read

... 100 IP hard or soft porn sites ...

And I shall call mine...

[GillBates0]

mah-Bell

it's nice until

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:it's nice until

[MichaelKaiserProScri]

Use Cisco ATA-186's with a nice analog 2-line callerid phone. Total cost about $180 per station.

Re:we use it for order status menu system

[OgreChow]

Mod -1, Arrogant

I am currently running Asterisk

[x.Draino.x]

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.

Just the basic hardware...

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Re:Just the basic hardware...

[lucabrasi999]

Customer service

Yeah. That would be a real problem Verizon provides great customer service today and I would have to invest heavily in trying to equal their support level.

Gotta go now, I've been on hold for 45 minutes...

Re:we use it for order status menu system

[lucabrasi999]

Then again I am not a run of the mill programmer and have enough smarts to pull it off.

Too bad you don't have the Testicular Fortitude to post as a logged in user.

Cost to build cost to maintain

[TwoEdge77]

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.

Been doing this already for some time.

[jaredmauch]

I operate our VoIP system at my employer. We have over 120 users across the globe where their mgmt has purchased/acquired them phones, be it soft-phones (xten works nicely) or the nice Cisco 7960 IP phones.

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.

It ain't bad, but it sure ain't scalable

[Miniluv]

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.

And when it breaks...

[torinth]

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.

Re:And when it breaks...

[drooling-dog]

You had to know that this discussion was going to go the way of the Microsoft response to Linux.

The rational position is to take a hard look at the actual value of this "support" relative to what you're paying for it, keeping in mind that its high cost stems largely from the closed and proprietary nature of the products being supported. It would be surprising if a competitive independent service & support industry for open source telephony didn't spring up, and once it does it is likely to considerably more economical than the premium brands.

Re:And when it breaks...

[chill]

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

The system is only a part of the cost

[QuantumRiff]

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.

Office-class phones

[glomph]

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.

Doing it now

[gregmac]

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.

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 .. 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).

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.

Looking at this recently.

[Blapto]

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!

Re:Looking at this recently.

[glomph]

I'm doing EXACTLY that right now. We set it up almost a year ago. The biggest cost is when you have to interface Asterisk to an existing conventional PBX (IF you need to do this, we did). Because then, you have to deal with the specially-trained people who install & provision the trunk card on THAT end. This can cost anywhere from $1000 - $12000 depending on equipment & locale.

If you can just do it with new IP phones on everyone's desk, it gets MUCH simpler.

Re:we use it for order status menu system

[atheos]

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.

Ahahahaha

[Jailbrekr]

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.

Re:Ahahahaha

[nolife]

Can to give some insight on some of the hidden costs that were not mentioned?

My own telecom? Really? Wow!

[Brento]

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?

Not a "telecom"

[Dun Malg]

"Start Your Own Open Source-Based Telecom"

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.

Re:Not a "telecom"

[Teancum]

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).

Re:All these VOIP phones

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

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?

ASDI Phones?

[Unit3]

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.

Is Asterisk a secured VoIP system?

[IronChefMorimoto]

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

Re:Is Asterisk a secured VoIP system?

[glomph]

For audio security, you do NOT (or better not) rely on something in the phone switch (Asterisk/Avaya/whatever) to do it. You need endpoint-to-endpoint encryption. Sipura equipment (among others) does this as a standard feature. Then the switch just shuffles the bits along.

In my multioffice/worldwide Asterisk setup the various sites connect to each other via CIPE or Open VPN tunnels, so at least the bits that leave the office are scrambled.

Re:Is Asterisk a secured VoIP system?

[mfarver]

Asterisk can be pretty secure.. and it can be pretty unsecure depending on your config. SIP and most of the VOIP protocols are by default unencrypted. VPN or VLAN should be used whenever privacy is required.

The big thing about Asterisk is control..

My Mitel phone systems are not my own despite having paid up front for them. They have licensing, limited documentation and pay for software upgrades. Mitel won't even let me pay to attend a user level training course unless I have a "endorsement" from the vendor who sold me the hardware. Since becomeing a vendor requires a $20k initial capitol outlay, I have a limited choice of vendors.

With Asterisk I can roll my own or pay someone to do it for me.. and if the vendor tries to squeeze me I can swap vendors. Asterisk is open enough and well documented: even if I don't understand everything, I still can understand enough to tell when the vendor is stretching the truth. Bad customer service is pretty much standard in the telecom world.

My biggest gripe about Asterisk is that is it do not have the fancy (and propriatary) digital phones with multiple soft line and speed dial keys... but thats a trade off.

Open Source gives the customer leverage, and levels the paying field. And sometimes it even costs less.

Re:My own telecom? Really? Wow!

[tomstdenis]

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

A sample Asterisk AGI script

[Lancer]

Here's a link to a sample AGI (Asterisk Gateway Interface) script that accepts an ISBN number punched in by the caller and returns the Amazon price of the item.

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.

Connection to POTS?

[querencia]

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?

Re:Connection to POTS?

[stratjakt]

That's what your T1 line is.

No, this isn't starting a telco. This is setting up a PBX for your office, large or small. Timothy just doesn't grok the difference.

Re:Connection to POTS?

[Anomalyst]

I am by no means an expert, but you can get get POTS connectiveity for independent lines in less than T1 chunks, I believe these are the FXS cards which should be available in 1/2/4 line flavors.

Re:Connection to POTS?

[ghqman]

Right, you still need to pay to interconnect with the telephone network so you can be billed for call completion etc.

Easier said than done

[pele_smk]

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.

Latency - delay in transmission of your voice.

[kyoorius]

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

Not nearly as cheap or easy as it looks

[Tracy Reed]

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