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Asterisk 1.8 Released With Support For Google Voice
Thinkcloud writes with a note that long-standing open-source VoiP software Asterisk has just been updated, and it's packed with more than 200 enhancements, security updates, and new features — including calendar integration and support for Google Voice and Google Talk. Asterisk's fully-featured PBX includes call waiting, hold and transfer, caller ID, and other useful tools so it's a great option for small businesses that need to watch costs."
Unfortunately, the small business is HIGHLY unlikely to have any of the skill set to get asterisk running, negotiate the Voip mine-field, and not lose calls and voice mail, and generate crippling telephone disruption for the entire business.
The benefits it offers just start to make it worth while at about 25 users or so, due to the falling prices of cat5 phone systems which you can pick up for pretty cheap these days, especially on the used market.
Asterisk is probably not really warranted until you have a hundred desks or so, and only then if you happen to have a fairly good geek on staff.
It is scalable, but not for the entry level technician unless all you want it to do is handle voice mail.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
There are a number of packaged implementations, like PBX in a Flash and Elsatix. If you have basic knowledge of TCP/IP networking you can work your way through it. There are lots of tutorials. I wrestled my way through it and found that it's not that hard unless you need copper lines. Just need to pay special attention to security so you din't end up with a $10,000 phone bill. We're getting ready to dump Vonage for straight VOIP by the minute. For what I'm paying Vonage every month I can have 3 numbers, each with 2 "lines" and 5 times the minutes. We went from PacBell, to Cox to Vonage and now to ala carte VOIP - our phone bill will have gone from $75 to $15 a month...
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
You are wrong. Asterisk 1.8 supports SRTP. I know, because I merged it myself. :-p
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
As others have said, Asterisk becomes much more obvious if you have an ITSP (Internet Telephone Service Provider). Here's an example of what I have done with it. I moved to Japan 3 years ago, but I still wanted to keep in touch with my friends. Calling long distance to/from Japan is expensive, no matter what plan you have. So I bought a DID (Direct Inward Dial) for my old home town. This gives my friends a local number to call. It routes over the internet to my Asterisk box and rings a softphone on my computer in Japan. The DID costs me $5 a month. Of course, there is a huge time change between Canada (where I moved from) and Japan. Asterisk has voice mail. If my phone isn't running on my computer, Asterisk takes a message and emails me the contents. When I wake up in the morning, I can listen to the message from my email and call the person back. Outgoing calls cost me 2 cents a minutes to North America and there are unlimited plans with many ITSPs (I don't bother because I don't make many outgoing calls).
Even without an ITSP Asterisk is useful. Perhaps you are used to using Skype or Google Talk to make computer to computer voice calls. Asterisk lets you talk to your friends using SIP (and now I guess Google Talk), but still have all the PBX features. So for instance, if your friend wants to send you a voice mail via SIP they can. You can set up conference calls fairly easily as well. You can buy very inexpensive USB handsets that look like telephones and hook them up to your computer. If you set your softphone's audio device to the handset, it ends up working pretty much like a normal phone. Or you can buy a SIP handset (a bit more expensive) and simply plug it in anywhere you have a network connection. This allows you to set up as many extensions controlled by your Asterisk PBX as you want. It's handy if you have kids, especially since DIDs are really, really, cheap.
Finally, for some fun you can easily set up ring groups on Asterisk. Talking on a cell phone is generally expensive. Instead, you can set up a DID for your Asterisk box and everyone can call you there. If you have your softphone up, it will ring that first. If it isn't up (or you don't answer it) you can get it to call your cell phone with an outgoing call. You can even set up a voice mail menu that asks the calling person if they would rather leave a message or try your cell phone. And to be even fancier you can vary the response based on who's calling. If it's someone you don't know you can direct them to voice mail immediately, if it's someone you don't care about much you can just allow them to ring the softphone, if it's likely to be important than you can forward to your cell.
This should give you a few ideas. There are really an endless number of options. Especially since you have source code with Asterisk you can make it do whatever you want.