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Open Source Telephony Gives Customers Control

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the fast-hacks-and-slow-biz dept.

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."

2 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. Junction Networks by mysqlrocks · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  2. Control is only to your door by sjbe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.