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Asterisk Breeds A Cottage Industry
gardel writes "The open-source PBX is popular, powerful and affordable. But setting up and maintaining Asterisk in its distributed form is a technical challenge for even the most accomplished of geeks. Now, Voxilla reports, several new companies (more than 60, at last count), smelling a good business opportunity, offer simplified graphical front-ends for Asterisk. And more are on the way."
So does the PBX connect to a normal net line (T1) or can this do VOIP too? Also, what would the GUI do for monitoring, or is it just for configuration? Can you tap lines with it or reroute calls? Sounds like this could be fun.
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
Note that not all of the solutions are open-source like PBX, although AMP is.
The popular open-source PBX is popular
No way really?
Sigs are for Terrorists.
A setup/administration GUI is what Red Hat sells(sold?), what SuSE sells, what Mandrake(or whatever it's called now), Xandros, and Linspire sell... This is probably a sign that Asterisk is here to stay. Or since we knew that already, that Asterisk not finished growing anytime soon.
There's an old saying that says pretty much whatever you want it to.
The company I work for is moving in a couple months, and we're taking the opportunity to upgrade our voicemail system. For a while I had hopes of maybe getting Asterisk to do it -- yay Free Software -- but then I started looking into it. As near as I can figure, after a day's Googling, our regular, analog, non-VOIP Meridian phones just won't talk to Asterisk-compatible hardware...but that's what I told the boss. (That, and I didn't have time to do it.)
The honest truth is, I suspected it couldn't be done, or at least couldn't be done cheaply, but I couldn't wrap my head around what I was reading. I began to understand how my father feels when I try to explain to him what I'm doing.
I have rarely felt so ignorant as when I tried to understand what hardware and what connections from the phone company would be needed:
- to connect Asterisk to the telephone company's wires (the CO, I
think)
- to connect Asterisk to our own phones so calls could come in
- and to let us make phone calls out.
I tried finding some consultant or company who could do this for us, but no luck. So we're getting a bigger and better version of the Norstar system we've got now. And that's fine -- it's done, someone else is doing it, and someone else is going to support it. But some kind of phone-networking-for-dummies would've been great.Carousel is a lie!
Most of these solutions are proprietary, and probably will die as 2-3 FOSS solutions gets generally accepted.
But these 60 companies will probably prosper anyway, with supplying consultancy and support for what I think is the most successful FOSS project ever in it's application domain.
If a GUI is so important wouldnt Cisco have one for their routers/switches? Setting up extensions in Asterisk is no harder than setting up an access list on a router. If you need a GUI then maybe you should not be doing it.
Asterisk is a FOSS PBX (private branch exchange) and Voice over IP gateway. The PBX part means that you have phones on your desks that don't connect to the real phone lines unless you want to dial out of the company. The VOIP gateway means that it can talk to SIP and H323 systems, as well as having its own protocol, IAX. Most of the useful features require extra hardware, called FXO and FXS cards. These cards allow it to talk to the phone company lines and to talk to the phones on the desk. Without the extra hardware, you just have a computer that can talk to software phones and take voice mail. You cannot just use regular modems. It is very flexible, and if you have two or three offices, it can save you long distance charges by routing those calls over the internet. This is just a basic idea of what it can do, it what Asterisk is used for. Check out "Asterisk at home" for a fairly simple installation that includes a good web interface.
Dear AngryParsley,
:)
You seem to have a lot of drive and enthusiasm, which is obviously not finding a productive outlet, have you thought about getting some part-time work in IT? Perhaps try doing some volunteer work!
Maybe you've not yet graduated and are going through that 'difficult' stage. Girls don't seem to like you, the sporty kids bully you. We've all been there, it'll pass. The simple fact that is girls mature faster than boys.
In a few years, you'll look back on these days and laugh!
Anyway, take care.
AC.
It wasn't long ago (still is in some parts) that PBX tech was primarily proprietory software running on expensive proprietory hardware.
As most PBX manufacturers are moving towards converged networks, VoIP, etc - more and more focus is being placed on Software and standards making these systems cheaper and cheaper.
Asterisk will have a lot of competition in the small biz market. I really love the technology, and think the project's fantastic, but if I were running a business and looking to purchase a PBX, I'd probably stear clear of Asterisk.
Purely because the Telephone System is the communications hub of most businesses. It's the one thing you don't expect to go down - so reliability is critical. There's no vendor backup, etc - same with most Open Source software, and while that wouldn't be an issue with most other applications - PBX's are a different kettle of fish.
I really hope it works out and at a minimum, hopefully it'll draw PBX costs down, but as the vendor based systems cost is currently very low and given that the margins for support, etc are also low in this field, I don't expect too much from the biz side of these things.
HOWEVER, if someone can translate the tech into something that can really save a business money and they can garuntee uptime, then they'll do well.
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
"gardel writes "The open-source PBX is popular, powerful and affordable. But setting up and maintaining Asterisk in its distributed form is a technical challenge for even the most accomplished of geeks. "
Translation: If you want to make money with OSS? Make it complicated, and difficult to use.
I'm a Linux noob and even I setup Asterisk@Home successfully. I bought a $6 Digium FXO card signed up with FWDout and off we go for free worldwide phone service.
No matter where you go , there you are.
I've been looking for a solution to a call center related problem. Besides the fact of leaving a 'written' (database driven) register of all incoming calls (day and hour, who called and who answered the call, and the subject of it), I'd like to record the whole call and attach it to its register. Privacy statements apart (users who call would be welcomed by a greeting which says that the call could be saved in order to improve QA and such), I've been wondering at this problem some time now and perhaps Asterisk could be the solution to it (perhaps I'm wrong - don't know), if anyone has some experience on this which could give some advice ... special hardware involved, etc. would be greatly appreciated
Articulos para gente geek: Poleras, linux, libros y mas
Try it without the @Home bit. The whole point of this article is that simplified graphical front ends are good, which is what you are seeing with Asterisk@Home.
Rolled out an Asterix PBX this weekend. Snom 360 IP POE phones connected to Fedora Core 3
box (HP DC 7100) with two Digium FXO cards. VoIP from the desk sets to server then outbound PSTN
(Public Switched Telephone Network). Used the Asterisk Management Portal front-end GUI so the
local users could have complete control over the management of the system. All I can say is....sweet.
ahhh i.c. , think I could have done it either way considering I didn't use AMP for the various .conf editting for fwdout or setting up the card.
AMP definately makes editting call groups easy.
No matter where you go , there you are.
In it's death-throws PBX attempts to be user friendly. VoIP laughs while twisting the knife and requesting additional funding. Several trunks cry.
I'm doing the Documentation for AMP which is probably (IMO) the best admin tool, and it's what is used for 99% of the administration of Asterisk@Home. AMP is rapidly becoming more than just a basic interface to Asterisk tho - the current CVS handles LCR, ZAP Trunks (eg, physical connections to the PSTN via ISDN or normal 2-wire FXO/FXS), Call Groups, Inbound call queues with everything you'd expect ("Your call is 4th in the queue. Your expected wait time is 3 minutes"). The current CVS of Asterisk, when used with AMP, gives you attended transfers, call (audio) recording, and a whole pile of other stuff.
Probably the best thing for someone new to VoIP is to get the latest version of Asterisk@Home (which is 0.9 at the time of this post) and an old machine, a couple of soft-phones (VoIP software that lets you make calls from your PC using your sound card) and a FWD number and start playing.
Feel free to leave me voicemail on my FWD number - 47876 - if you have any questions or comments!
--RobSchlock Mercenary.
asteriskathome.sourceforge.net
to hell with the pay versions. *@home has an awesome web frontend and allows you to do the manual magic that no pbx on the planet can even think of doing.
the hard part is finding sip phones that have fully programmable buttons that dont cost you 2 arms and 3 legs.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
So we're getting a bigger and better version of the Norstar system we've got now.
My company ditched Norstar and went with Cisco VoIP phones and phone servers. There's your solution.
Dial plans look like regular expressions, and even the folks with the pretty GUIs don't change that, because you'd basically need to invent another visual programming language to GUIfy them, and those suck.
Programming moderately-advanced user-driven functionality like letting users dial an extension to [arbitrary example] change call forwarding numbers, or [other arbitrary example] rerecord voice prompts -- is actually programming. The steps for validating that the user is who they ought to be, or coming from where they're supposed to; prompting them; storing data in the right places; coping nicely with error conditions -- it's all real programming, inasmuch as doing it right necessarily involves writing code. Sure, you can have a prepackaged solution that lets users do the most common tasks trivially from a GUI -- but any business that wants even moderately interesting things done will need something nontrivial done, and at that point you need to have the ability for someone who knows how to code get in and get things done.
Just the basics of "configuring the phones" -- that can be done from a GUI already. Hell, the prepackaged Asterisk-based solution we bought (before customizing the hell out of it) has a web UI for adding phone extensions, and the phones are all web-administrable as well (through a very, very slick interface). That doesn't mean that the coders are out of the loop, though, for anything but the most trivial of changes. The suits want to change the behaviour of calls to the main line so that they act differently based on business hours or whether the secretary is logged in to the company Jabber server? Needs skilled labor. The suits want to automatically charge customers phone calls made to the support line based on caller ID, and allow the support folks to override it at will? Needs skilled labor.
The thing is, though, I'm not just saying "needs skilled labor" as in "this is how it is right now"; I'm saying it as in "every attempt for the last 30 years to enable suits to do this kind of thing [creating application logic] unassisted has failed", starting with COBOL.
So, in conclusion: To the extent that there is such a need to allow managers to configure the thing, and to the extent that that need can actually be fulfilled, it already exists.
I'm doing the Documentation for AMP which is probably (IMO) the best admin tool, and it's what is used for 99% of the administration of Asterisk@Home. AMP is rapidly becoming more than just a basic interface to Asterisk tho - the current CVS handles LCR, ZAP Trunks (eg, physical connections to the PSTN via ISDN or normal 2-wire FXO/FXS), Call Groups, Inbound call queues with everything you'd expect ("Your call is 4th in the queue. Your expected wait time is 3 minutes"). The current CVS of Asterisk, when used with AMP, gives you attended transfers, call (audio) recording, and a whole pile of other stuff.
Probably the best thing for someone new to VoIP is to get the latest version of Asterisk@Home (which is 0.9 at the time of this post) and an old machine, a couple of soft-phones (VoIP software that lets you make calls from your PC using your sound card) and a FWD number and start playing.
Feel free to leave me voicemail on my FWD number - 47876 - if you have any questions or comments!
--RobSchlock Mercenary.
"The thing is, though, I'm not just saying "needs skilled labor" as in "this is how it is right now"; I'm saying it as in "every attempt for the last 30 years to enable suits to do this kind of thing [creating application logic] unassisted has failed", starting with COBOL."
Programming by Example.
That should be voip-info.org. I'm so used to mozilla just auto-completing, I type 'voip' and push enter in my address bar - I don't think about the top domain. (Annoyed Grunt).
However, voip-info has been having significant performance issues, so I think that *not* linking to it was a good idea. It looks like it's been slashdotted just by having the VoIP meme high in the geek global awareness.
--Rob
Schlock Mercenary.
Wouldn't it be more of a VoIP industry?
*rimshot*
Puh-leee-uh-ze. Cisco? They're the friggin' Nortel of VoIp! Proprietary, lock-in, unreliable junk.
Asterisk is a really extremely full featured high-end telco switch. The configurations is a little painful, but the quality is superb.
naeem
Agilis Systems
If you get your outgoing line from a VoIP provider such as Vonage, Packet8 or Broadvoice, you don't need any hardware for the outgoing side of Asterisk. If you don't, you only need a card that costs $6.85 + shipping on ebay.
For the stations, you either need an FXS card (about $100 per extension) or an IP phone (about $70 per phone) or a headset and software phone (about $10 per extension). Since most people aren't satisfied with the pure software phones, it's the hardware cost per extension that matters.
The Asterisk computer itself usually costs from $100 to $200; for "real" use you want a battery backup, and that's included in that estimate, as well as one FXO (outgoing) card. Then the best solution is IP phones for the stations, at whatever the cheapest you can get on ebay. You can get them for $40 sometimes, but usually it will be more.
I've been using a new reporting engine for asterisk and love it! Our old PBX is going to be a boat anchor in a month. It's from a small company called Somix and it's called Plumtrack (I have no clue what the "plum" means :))
Our company luckily has a geek that knows whats up.
http://www.somix.com/products/plumtrack.php
Asterisk ROCKS!
Try Ebay - you can get a reliable Avaya System 75 for under $5K - add an Avaya VOIP module - and your PBX turns into a VOIP PBX.
Why worry about PC quality when you can get a cheapo System 75 for dirt cheap?
Since the API is really open and can call your own little procedures in just about whatever script language you want makes for some really wild features being added to the Asterisk world that mystify traditional PBX people. Things like quick routing to voicemail or somewhere else based upon your AIM logged-in status.
The possibilities are huge.
I've just started cataloguing some of the more creative ones.
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
my impression is that the recommended hardware price with support is higher than Intel's product with Microsoft's solution. microsoftwith intel maybe better.
Network QoS and voicemail security would be something you'd have to focus on. You could still push out storage to the client if they wanted it though.
One of these days I'm moving to Theory - everything works there
Unfortunately, this article lends yet more support to those who like to dismiss Asterisk based on the cliche that it can only be handled by hard core Linux geeks.
Sure, if you want to use Asterisk to its full potential, then you have to learn a thing or two. But that isn't any different from any other tool, be it Apache, IIS, Oracle, PeopleSoft, Siebel, InDesign, Photoshop, Bryce, Final Cut, etc etc etc.
The important thing however is that you can get started with Asterisk very easily and without any special skillset.
The article doesn't mention anything about the fact that you can download an Asterisk installer for MacOS X along with a few configuration wizards and have a running PBX within a few minutes. It also doesn't mention that there is a similar Asterisk installer for Windows. At present, the Mac is the easiest platform to set up a basic PBX with Asterisk, but it shouldn't be too long before there will be configuration wizards for Asterisk on Windows, too.
Asterisk for MacOS X: http://www.sunrise-tel.com/
Asterisk for Windows: http://www.asteriskwin32.com/
How can we expect decision makers in companies to consider Asterisk if it is always presented as a Linux toy which requires Linux gurus to set up and run. That's precisely the kind of perception the incumbent proprietary system vendors love to promote when they pinch their overpriced stuff.
Let those people know that Asterisk is multi-platform and have them play with it on their platform of choice and there will soon be more mainstream deployments and more ease of use front ends.
Other than for Linux, Asterisk is so far available for FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD and Irix (both through the NetBSD package manager), MacOSX/Darwin, Windows and Solaris. Zaptel drivers (to use telephony interface cards) are available or in the works for FreeBSD, NetBSD, MacOSX and Solaris. If that doesn't deserve mentioning in an article about an Asterisk cottage industry, then I don't know what does.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
Considering that the propreitors of the rights to the Asterix cartoon character successfully challenged in court Mobilix, a site about mobile UNIX, what are they going to make of an open source PBX called Asterisk?
1. I've heard lots about Asterisk - and understand that it can be used as a PBX for a small-medium sized enterprise... and that it supports tailored voicemail etc. I am interested in a far smaller scale scenario. I have one land-line; one ADSL line and one mobile phone (with a number for which I can divert phone calls wherever I choose.) I want to manage calls in a more effective way... Ideally all my calls would arrive at my server - and depending upon time of day; caller ID; my location (at desk; at home; in-car etc.) handle calls appropriately. Anonymous callers should only get voicemail; calls from contacts I flag as "urgent" should be routed to me wherever I happen to be - etc. Can anyone point me at practical case studies of individuals setting up this sort of facility?
2. I don't feel comfortable with loudspeaker/microphone phone calls - I prefer to use a phone. I've seen £30 USB handsets that would work at my desk; I've seen £200 802.11b units too... as well as £30 boxes to allow me to use conventional phones as if they were SIP phones. Bearing in mind that I want this for a home-project (not to run an enterprise) what would be my cheapest option to get a cordless IP phone which both allows me to wander into the kitchen while on the phone as well as indicating to me who is calling if the phone rings when I'm away from my PC (but still in the same building)? Are there any good hardware reviews of budget-level equipment?
there also are a lot of firms selling pre-configured server solutions, complete with service and eye-candy. for example CoxOrange. I think this is a quite interesting development too.
See pictures of tits
Do you have a good speakerphone already for pots? Keep it and buy a Sipura 2000. It provides 2 lines and I bought one for $82 on eBay. At home, I have 2 normal cordless phones connected to it, and of course Asterisk running on a dedicated box. Good stuff.
Mobilix was sued (and lost) in Germany because its name vaguely looked liked obelix, a character from a french comic book named asterix. Go figure ...
The ugly part of that is that those characters are gaule warriors fighting the evil over-organised
over-bureaucratic roman empire and that I learned to read with those comics books.
Stupid greedy uderzo.
at work and I have a new-found respect for the PBX manufacturers that I used to curse. I'll never forget, we got the pots line talking to the zap trunk and the phone would actually ring when someone called!!! You have no idea of the ego deflation factor when I proudly told our first caller that I would transfer him, hit the transfer button and hung up on him.
One thing that it has opened my eyes to are the possibilities of SIP. We needed a seperate phone line and, after some looking, decided to go with broadvoice. In 10 minutes we had a new phone number that we could call.
One thing that we did find out is not to cheat the minimum specs. When it says 128MB (or 256, can't remember) of memory it means it. The *@home distro that we were using actually booted with 64 but it wouldn't answer the phones...:)
If you have ever tried configuring a real PBX, i.e, more than 8 lines, you will find it rather unfriendly to the casual user. Even small PBX systems can be far from easy when you start to get feature rich.
In fact, having seen the configs they use for big PBX systems, Asterisk with its wizards is definitely easier!
See my journal, I write things there
You are completely missing my point.
;-) so you can probably imagine that I am not all too fond of Windows myself.
I did _not_ suggest anybody should run a PBX or VoIP server on Windows. I wouldn't even suggest to run a web or mail server on Windows.
The point is that if you want to suggest to the average IT department to give Asterisk a trial, it goes a long long way if their IT folks who are most likely Windows admins can just download an installer and play with Asterisk on their platform.
As soon as the Windows admins have convinced themselves that they can run Asterisk on their Windows boxes for testing and verifying stuff, they won't be that hostile anymore and the question what platform to use for a production deployment can usually be discussed in a reasonable fashion.
I know database admins who run Oracle enterprise database servers on their notebooks. They would never suggest to deploy a production database on a notebook, but they feel all the more comfortable with it because they can run a sandbox environment on their notebooks.
Same principle applies to Asterisk.
Apart from that, since there are no Zaptel drivers available for Windows, the only way you could build a PBX would be to use external VoIP gateways, such as the Sipura-3000 for instance. The Sipura-3000, like many other such gateways have a passthrough feature. If anything goes wrong, such as the Asterisk server being unreachable, or even in the event of a power outage on the Sipura itself, any incoming PSTN call will automatically be passed to the FXS port on the unit to which you would probably have an analog telephone connected.
For a home PBX, this might just be all the redundancy you need and many folks might not feel too uneasy to run such a basic setup on a Windows box, especially not if the alternative is setting up a Linux box when they might not have any clue how to go about that.
Then again, there are other uses for Asterisk than being a PBX. You could use it as a VoIP server only setting up your own SIP URIs where people can call you on your email address, like sip:myname@mydomain.com. Again, for private use most people might not feel too uneasy running such a facility on a Windows box.
The more people run their own VoIP servers at home -- Windows or otherwise -- the better the network effect. Remember Metcalfe's law!
BTW, I run my Asterisk server on a Mac
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
The poster's employer wasn't paying him to make a year's project out of it, and figure things out so as to light the way for the whole rest of the world.
His employer was only asking him to look into a possible freebie for a day, and then get back to work on his day job. So no, he is not the one who can grok the whole system and get it into readable tech-manual form.
Powerful = Usable. Obviously this system is not that, which is why 60 companies are trying to make it powerful and usable.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If you were to run your own Asterisk server, you can always tell all your friends to download Firefly from http://www.virbiage.com/ which is a software phone not unlike the Skype client software, but instead of a closed proprietary protocol it supports SIP and IAX.
Your friends will then be able to call you directly on your Asterisk server and you will be able to call them on their softphone, all free of charge.
If they have their PC on a public IP address, SIP is OK, if they are behind a NAT (private IP address, eg 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x) then there is a chance they will not get incoming calls from you without fiddling. In that case IAX is your choice of protocol.
There main thing about Skype is that they have bolted on all the NAT traversal troubleshooting hacks of SIP and shrinkwrapped them bolted on to their protocol. This means that the end user doesn't have to worry about NAT as the software picks the most suitable workaround automatically. You may call that built-in NAT troubleshooting.
With standard SIP based solutions, you have to do the NAT traversal troubleshooting manually. Yet, with Asterisk you can always avoid those troubles altogether by using IAX instead of SIP. IAX was designed so it wouldn't need any workarounds for NAT in the first place. You may call that NAT troublefree.
With Asterisk you definitely get the better technology and more importantly freedom to choose equipment, protocols, codecs, service providers. With Skype you are totally locked in just like it used to be in Ma Bell's days.
the macintosh asterisk mailing list http://www.astm
I've been wanting something that lets me pick up my phone at home, the problem with asterisk is that its designed to get the phone directly plugged in to it and everything else plugs in to that. I'm just wondering if theres anything I can use thats simpler than a full featured PBX
Why bother with Asterisk when you can buy one of these for less than $100? You get call routing, one FXS and one FXO port, lots of configurable options, and great community
I realize that Asterisk is a good fit for some specific applications, but you can buy a complete call router for less than a single port FXS card....
And why isn't there any open source gui front ends? This looks like an area that is lacking and can easily be filled by open source programmers. But in order to have a good workable gui, companies have gotta come up with it since they request customer feedback, have usability experts, etc. And of course having an open source gui front end wouldn't easily happen since the programmers thinking is that its good enough for me to use, its good enough for everyone else to use.
My Gawd WTF...
Why do it that way? The point of using it is so you can ditch the high priced PSTN lines (and ISDN is even more expensive - here at least). And decent sized company would need a bunch of these lines. That would cost a lot to install all the ISDN lines, cost a lot of money monthly, and quickly fill the PCI slots with digium cards (it's only so expensible that way - a system has a limited amount of PCI slots).
You can get some VERY, VERY CHEAP VoIP providers instead. As long as your (existing, and paid for) internet connection is fast enough, everything will work great. It won't really cost much bandwidth, at least MUCH less than the savings over using a PSTN provider. And there's no need to fill PCI slots with cards and adding lines. Yes, you will need a good ISP, a fast enough upstream, decent switching equipment and finally a decent VoIP provider.
The savings? I don't have actual numbers (although you can google and find lots of "success" stories and savings) for businesses, but even for home, using VoIP cut about 2/3 of my old phone bill. (Both PSTN and VoIP lines are more expensive for businesses than home, but the savings are still there). We've replaced most [voice] trunk lines for ethernet wiring too, so no need for cards there either.
You may want to have one PSTN line (or ISDN) for redundancy and emergency purposes as not VoIP providers even offer 911 service, and it goes out with the power or your ISP.
If you go that way, keep in mind that not all VoIP providers are equal. You might have to try a few before you settle for a good (and reasonably priced) one.
The GUI hardly adds bloat. Most front ends I've seen like that were quite small, fast and simple. Their weak point in most cases is lack of advanced functions/configuration. They can do simple jobs quickly and easily, but for complex things, they don't do anything.
...)
As for Meridians, we actually have a GUI that talks to the meridian switch in it's "normal language" over telnet, but we never use it. It's easy enough to do from the CLI, most techs are familiar with it, and you can have some notes handy for the not as common stuff (plus, the ref books aren't too bad either). Most acronyms/commands are easy to remember (PUA = Pick Up Allowed,
Because a comparable Asterisk system could be built and deployed for 1/5th the cost?