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Asterisk Breeds A Cottage Industry

Posted by timothy on from the press-4-to-hear-monkeys-screaming dept.

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."

5 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Re:cool by mindstrm · · Score: 5, Informative

    It is primarily used for voip, actually, though handles leased lines (T1, E1, etc) perfectly well with supported hardware. Everything form $20 pots cards so you can use it as an answering machine at home to multiple T1 cards are supported... and lots of voip.

    You can do everything with it, but configuration is a lot of text files in true unix fashion.. it's more of a framework than a completed solution... which is what the article is about.. asterisk is really powerful, but setting up a complicated setup is sort of, well, complicated (though I find the complexity is about right for the level of flexibility)

  2. Re:cool by cduffy · · Score: 4, Informative

    WRT tapping lines and rerouting calls -- having just installed an Asterisk-based phone system at work, I find myself not informing the business-types of its full capabilities just for the sake of not making them nervous. Very, very cool stuff -- though we now have some extra dependencies involved in making the phones work, we also have a fully customizable (and largely customized), featureful phone system. As it is, we're tied into a T1 for the outside world and doing VoIP (IAX when we can and SIP when we can't) to talk to the phones themselves. Features on the TODO list include integration with the CRM system (to make a note whenever a customer calls one of us or visa-versa, for instance) -- nothing about it's hard, just time-consuming.

    Unfortunately, IP phones with quality full-duplex speakerphone support (unlike the otherwise excellent Sipura SPA-841s we're using) are *expensive*. (Know of a sub-$200 SIP phone with good speakerphone support? Let me know!)

  3. Asterisk is many things, but not without hardware by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. The article fails to link to.... by Rob+from+RPI · · Score: 4, Informative
    the most important and popular Asterisk site. Specifically, voip-info - a wiki where you'll find documentation on everything you'd like to know about Asterisk and various ways of administering it.

    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!

    --Rob
    --
    Schlock Mercenary.
  5. Re:This is cool... by geggo98 · · Score: 4, Informative
    It's easy to connet Asterisk to your Telco's line. Just use a standard ISDN-Card or a modem. To connect your internal devices is a little bit more tricky. You can find appropiate hardware on http://www.digium.com/ or http://www.junghanns.net/.
    Background: You can't connect two ISDN devices or two modems with some kind of cross cable witout some additional tricks. To drive analog phones, you need a modem card with FXS support, for ISDN telephones, the card must support the NT-mode. E.g. the Junghanns QuadBRI card support NT and can drive up to 4 ISDN lines. The Wildcard TDM400P supports FXS can drive four analog devices. Both run fine with Asterisk.

    Acronyms:
    FXS: Foreinge Exchange Subscriber
    NT: Network Trminator