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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."
Note that not all of the solutions are open-source like PBX, although AMP is.
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!
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.
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.
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.
You are on the right track. The Call Detail Records (CDR) are comprehensive and there are packages to analyse them. I am also using a Call Accounting package that does costing by groups of extensions.
..at..masonc .. dot com)
Call Monitoring, the recordsing of each call tot he ahrddrive is a native application and I am about to implement for a stock trading company I am working with.
Asterisk is stable, powerful and free. If you are using IP phones and routing all calls through a VOIP provider, all you need is a linux server. I you need to connect to the PSTN lines, a 2 in 2 out card is only $500, and there are much larger interfaces for large scale analog phones and pstn lines.
Contrary to opinion, learning to configure Asterisk is not hard, it just takes some time and a chance to experiment. I implemented it as our home office system first before offering it to clients. My family are fed up with the often broken system but you have to have that chance to play around if you are going to understand the dialplan options.
Send me an email if you need any help (masonc
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
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
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.