Slashdot Mirror
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."
The popular open-source PBX is popular
No way really?
Sigs are for Terrorists.
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)
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.
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!)
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.
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.
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
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.
I see there are a few CLI purists in this thread, and I understand their point. Granted, a GUI adds bloat. It isn't as pure. And yes, major PBX systems like Meridian are all CLI.
On the other hand, GUI's are a blessing for people that are smart enough to know what needs to happen but who might need a reminder or two to hit every config point. When I can see an option in a GUI panel versus having to juggle 60 or so config files in my mind I am a lot better off.
My guess is that most FOSS folks here are on the data and not voice networking side. Conversely, I just got done overseeing a T1 circuit install for a customer move and had an opportunity to talk with the PBX guy. I mentioned Asterisk and got a blank look in return.
If a GUI would help spur adoption of this technology by making it a tad easier to use for us data types, I am all for 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!
--RobSchlock Mercenary.
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.
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.
And yes, major PBX systems like Meridian are all CLI.
I used to work on a Aspect phonesystem that has the complete callflow in a GUI kind of way. Just drag and drop the different steps and you were done.
Although not completely easy, it is a lot easier to do on more complicated callflows. A lot easier then working on a sort of basic where you needed much more knowledge on another system.
Another advatages was that you could inform both management and people what happend in a phonecall by just doing a printout and follow the system. Also very easy to addept if waiting times are too long, when there are hollidays or to insert emergency messages.
Perhaps not needed if all you need is a message when you are closed and an aswering service for those that are not in. It will become handy if you have several numbers recieving larger amounts of numbers from different sources fr different reasons with different priorities.
Or even first start with one number and then want to insert extra possibilaties as your company grows, without having the need for a programmer.
I am in Belgium so what we had was naturlay first language choice, then department choice, then depending on the department another extra choice, then connection to the different people if they were in, otherwise to others. All depending on the language skills of the people as well.
e.g. see that if the person had a question about his bill that he would not be connected to the reception.
A lot more choices and options were involved and we were working on even more.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
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