Open Source Telephony Gives Customers Control

Linux.com's Tina Gasperson recently had the chance to sit down and talk with Thomas Howe, a small shop owner working to help implement open source telephony solutions. "Howe says open code is the key to highly customizable phone systems that truly meet the needs of individual companies. 'The telecom world has typically been a very closed environment. In terms of technology and deployment, they control every aspect of the experience. The idea of being open and allowing customers to have control is a radical thought.' But that is just what Howe is doing. Howe bases his custom communications solutions on Asterisk, the popular full-featured open source telephony engine that many companies are adopting as they move away from legacy phone systems in an effort to save money and gain more control over their infrastructure."

Comments

Re:Does "open" include the ability to spoof caller

[El Pollo Loco]

fear what phishers/advertisers/malware distributors might be able to do

Well, the flipside is that of security. Open code will reveal bugs. These bugs will be fixed, and the code will be more secure. Don't forget that companies selling platforms on asterik have to support their products. Customers get mad when their telephones go down from hacking. The companies that sell asterik will have an incentive to fix the problem.

Re:Control is only to your door

[dumeinst]

I've tried running our full pbx (15-20 users) off our comcast cable and I have nevered suffered so much in such a short period of time. We ended up going to a T1 and haven't had a single problem since. The ideal situations for us is a channelized T1 with 12 channels voice and 12 channels data. That way we can do incoming on the voice (cheap) and outgoing on the data (cheap)