Asterisk

A Telephony Revolution

An incredible revolution is underway. It has been a long time in coming, but now that it has started, there will be no stopping it. It is taking place in an area of technology that has lapsed embarrassingly far behind every other industry that calls itself high-tech. The industry is telecommunications, and the revolution is being fuelled by an open source Private Branch Exchange (PBX) called Asterisk.

Telecommunications is arguably the last major electronics industry that has (until now) remained untouched by the open source revolution. Major telecommunications manufacturers still build expensive, incompatible systems, running complicated, outdated code on impressively engineered yet obsolete hardware. If you want it to actually do anything interesting, you’ll have to pay extra licensing fees for closed, limited-functionality, shrink-wrapped applications. Customization? Forget it—it’s not in the plan. Future technology and standards compliance? Give them a year or two—they’re working on it. All of the major telecommunications manufacturers offer similar-minded products. They don’t want you to have flexibility or choice; they want you to be locked in to their product cycles.

Asterisk changes all that. With Asterisk, no one is telling you how your phone system works, or what technology you are limited to. If you want it, you can have it. Asterisk lovingly embraces the concept of standards compliance, while also enjoying the freedom to develop its own innovations. What you choose to implement is up to you, we imposes no limits with Asterisk.

VoIP: Bridging the Gap between Traditional Telephony and Network

Telephony

While Voice over IP (VoIP) is often thought of as little more than a method of Obtaining free long-distance calling, the real value (and—let’s be honest—challenge as well) of VoIP is that it allows voice to become nothing more than another application in the data network. It sometimes seems that we’ve forgotten that the purpose of the telephone is to allow people to communicate. It is a simple goal, really, and it should be possible for us to make it happen in far more flexible and creative ways than are currently available to us. Since the industry has demonstrated an unwillingness to pursue this goal, Paul Colmer & Associates and a large community of passionate people have taken on the task. The challenge comes from the fact that an industry that has changed very little in the last century shows little interest in starting now.

Massive Change Requires Flexible Technology

The most successful key telephone systems in the world have design limitations that has survived 15 years of users begging for what appears to be a simple change: Now, it’s all very well and good to pick on one system, but the reality is that every PBX in existence suffers shortcomings. No matter how fully featured it is, something will always be left out, because even the most feature-rich PBX will always fail to anticipate the creativity of the customer. A small group of users will desire an odd little feature that the design team either did not think of or could not justify the cost of building, and, since the system is closed, the users will not be able to build it themselves. If the Internet had been thusly hampered by regulation and commercial interests, it is doubtful that it would have developed the wide acceptance it currently enjoys. The openness of the Internet meant that anyone could afford to get involved. So, everyone did. The tens of thousands of minds that collaborated on the creation of the Internet delivered something that no corporation ever could have.

As with many other open source projects, such as Linux and the Internet, the explosion of Asterisk was fuelled by the dreams of people who knew that there had to be something more than what the industry was producing. The strength of the community is that it is composed not of employees assigned to specific tasks, but rather of people from all sorts of industries, with all sorts of experiences, and all sorts of ideas about what flexibility means, and what openness means Most manufacturers dedicate no more than a few developers to any one product; Asterisk has scores. Most proprietary PBXs have a worldwide support team comprised of a few dozen real experts; Asterisk has hundreds. The depth and breadth of expertise that surrounds this product is unmatched in the telecom industry. Asterisk enjoys the loving attention of old Telco guys who remember when rotary dial mattered, enterprise telecom people who recall when voicemail was the hottest new technology, and data communications geeks and coders who helped build the Internet. These people along with Paul Colmer & Associates all share a common belief: that the telecommunications industry needs a proper revolution.

Asterisk: The Hacker’s PBX

Telecommunications companies who choose to ignore Asterisk do so at their peril. The flexibility it delivers creates possibilities that the best proprietary systems can scarcely dream of. This is because Asterisk is the ultimate hacker’s PBX. If someone asks you not to use the term hacker, refuse. That term does not belong to the mass media. They stole it and corrupted it to mean “malicious cracker.” It’s time we took it back. Hackers built the networking engine that is the Internet. Hackers built the Apple Macintosh and the Unix operating system. Hackers are also building your next telephone system. Do not fear; we are the good guys, and we will be able to build a system that’s far more secure than anything that exists today, because rather than being constricted by the dubious and easily cracked security of closed systems, we will be able to quickly respond to changing trends in security and fine-tune the telephone system in response to both corporate policy and industry best practices. Like other open source systems, Asterisk will be able to evolve into a far more secure platform than any proprietary system, not in spite of its hacker roots, but rather because of them.

Asterisk: The Professional’s PBX

Never in the history of telecommunications has a system so suited to the needs of business been available, at any price. Asterisk is an enabling technology, and, as with Linux, it will become increasingly rare to find an enterprise that is not running some version of Asterisk, in some capacity, somewhere in the network, solving a problem as only Asterisk can. This acceptance is likely to happen much faster than it did with Linux, though, for several reasons:

1. Linux has already blazed the trail that led to open source acceptance, so Asterisk can follow that lead.

2. The telecom industry is crippled, with no leadership being provided by the giant industry players. Asterisk has a compelling, realistic, and exciting vision.

3. End users are fed up with incompatible, limited functionality, and horrible support. Asterisk solves the first two problems; Paul Colmer & Associates has a passion for the latter.

The Asterisk Community

One of the compelling strengths of Asterisk is the passionate community that developed and supports it. One of the more powerful side effects caused by the energy of the Asterisk community is the cooperation it has spawned among the telecommunications professionals, networking professionals, and information technology professionals who share a love for this phenomenon. While these professions have traditionally been at odds with each other, in the Asterisk community they delight in each other’s skills. Paul Colmer & Associates are proud to be a part of this community. The significance of this cooperation cannot be underestimated.

The Business Case

It is very rare to find businesses these days that do not have to reinvent themselves every few years. It is equally rare to find a business that can afford to replace its communications infrastructure each time it goes in a new direction. Today’s businesses need extreme flexibility in all of their technology, including telecom. The idea that the value of the system will be discovered rather than known at the time of installation implies, in turn, that product flexibility and adaptability, as well as ongoing account service, should be critical components of any buyer’s evaluation checklist.” What this means, in part, is that the true value of a technology is often not known until it has been deployed.