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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 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.