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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
I've been using it domestically since 2002. It has run all our home phones for three years now.
If you want to do something quickly, there are live CDs that will have you set up in very little time. If you like to tinker, get Asterisk: The Future of Telephony from O'Reily and a linksys spa terminal adapter so you can use an ordinary phone.
Something like the spa-2002 is nice becuase you get two lines. It's easier to experiment if you have two numbers. Linksys make WIFI dongles for these too. They're nice because you can then add a phone line anywhere in the house. Once you'r ehooked you can think about spending money on SIP phones. The SNOM phones seem to be favourites, or you could get a Cisco number like you might have in the office. They give you the nice big LCD display to play with.
Once you have played for a little, you'll probably never look back. Remember you really do want 256kb+ upstream bandwidth and if your home network is doing anything else you'll really appreciate some QoS. You also want a stable network connection. You can use Codecs to work round bandwidth, latency 100ms tends not to be too bad, but jitter is a killer. if your pings are all over the place, you'll end up sounding like an extra from Dr Who.
I have set up asterisk at home and love it. In fact, I wrote a voicemail app for it and put it out there for free - http://www.littlejohnconsulting.com/ari/ My install has voicemail space till you fill up the harddrive, call attendant, and unlimited routing/call forwarding options for the lines I have. My favorite is what I have heard called the ex-girlfriend option, where you route calls that you know you do not want to never-neverland. Your don't have to know they called.
I have it running on an old 600Mhz machine, have a digium card, and used http://freepbx.org/. If I had it to do over again, I would not have any phone line hardware (drop the digium card) and do everything voip buying the service from a voip vendor.
I found it to be a lot of fun and to meet my needs it did not take to much effort. Lots of help is out there now.
Having spent the last few weeks setting up Asterisk and such i've found a few things major to most smaller companies that it doesn't do well. For one, SLA or Shared Line Appearance (aka, everyone can see who's on line 1, pick up the call and answer it). While the code exists it's hard to use, the documentation is poor, and the people in the IRC channel only manage to mock those who don't know that the secret lies in a pdf buried in the subversion source code and will only expend the energy to type out some cryptic code to their bot that points you at the same tired document that doesn't answer your questions. The SLA in Asterisk *works* if you have the right equipment and the time to set it up but Linksys does it one way, Aastra another, and Polycom one more. The goals of the Asterisk project seem alright but the developers seem to have it all wrong. Rather than focusing on the features users want and getting them right they are kinda hacking it all together and deciding it needs to be worked on later. Rather than making it run well on most systems, they sacrifice things to make it run on the 133mhz machine hiding in Edison's garage. I know making it light on memory is important as too much will make voice quality horrible but there comes a point when the user side of things has to be more important. My last gripe with Asterisk is that there are a few different people working on different versions all at the same time seemingly getting nowhere. Take Asterisk, elastix, FreePBX, OpenPBX, and whatever else may be out there and get all the devs to work together and get it up to something that feels mainstream and open source worthy. Asterisk is a great project but it's still got a ways to go before it's ready for massive rollouts. The only reason i'm setting one up is that the current BizFone system we have crapped out and has been crap from day one.
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.