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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."
I am a small business owner and we use Junction Networks for our telephone system. Their services are standards based (e.g. SIP federation) and don't have stupid limitations like Vonage (who charge per line instead of just usage) or Skype (who don't federate with other SIP providers). The hosted PBX is pretty nice or you can use IAX trunking if you prefer to run your own Asterisk PBX. I am not affiliated with them - just a happy customer. If you're a small business I recommend you check them out.
Bradley Holt
How open is open, and how open should open be?
Telecommunications is a critical commons and I fear what phishers/advertisers/malware distributors might be able to do it they are given too much access to the code.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
... to make telecoms systems work properly. Most protocol suites are sufficiently poorly specified that a certain amount of folklore, which you can only gain from years in the industry, is necessary as well as a careful reading of the specs.
... yeah, right.
... and I mean mass market rock-solid stable phones like bog standard Nokias ... where the "bug" is its failure to implement some detail of the standard that has never been needed in a live network. Great fun to play with, to be sure, if you've got your own private base station and a bunch of test SIMs, but you don't want people doing this sort of playing in important parts of the live system.)
I really do hate to think what would happen to the world's telephone system if vital pieces of infrastructure have code in them that is randomly hacked around by amateurs, well-meaning or otherwise. "Look, this must work, look, it says so here in the spec, my code follows the standards, it's all the other guys who are wrong, they should fix theirs"
(Example: as soon as you do something to base station code which looks perfectly allowed according to the GSM specs but is out of the ordinary, ie is not something that current live systems routinely do, you start coming across "bugs" in phones
We installed an Asterisk based solution at a company I owned. All open source stuff. The features and performance per $ were amazing. We loved how it could be customized to our needs and it saved a bundle. Or so we thought. Problem was, our "control" only lasted to our door. We had a great system but our ISP (Charter Cable in this instance) would drop packets, had misbehaving routers, and generally didn't give a crap that half our customers couldn't hear us or could old hear every other word we said. We just could not get a phone system that worked because we couldn't get reliable bandwidth. (yes we had uptime "guarantees" which were worth the paper they were written on since we lacked the resources to sue) Of course we could have bought their solution for about 10X the cost and were almost forced to.
IP telephony is the wave of the future and I'm very positive on the open source stuff. But unless you have copious and reliable bandwidth, beware that you may not have the control you think you do.