atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones Asterisk - TDM/Proprietary VoIP Killer?

I think there are about 30 versions of Asterisk in the market today that are commercially available. Everyday there is a new Asterisk box of some sort coming into the market.

I fear Asterisk could truly be a major player and TDM/Proprietary VoIP killer/Traditional Key System Manufacturer Killer in 3 - 5 years in the SMB market space as SIP becomes the major deployable standard and analog/digital TDM dies off very quickly.

Anyone else see this coming?

Steve,

I think you're right on the money. Just like you said there are 30 guys out there all trying to sell something that cost them nothing, and the end result is a lot of people getting a bad taste in their mouth about asterisk. I have a little asterisk box at home and I updated to the latest vs of FreePBX and it totally destroyed my install. I had to start over from scratch. These are the things keeping opensource softswitches from mainstream deployment. What systems have you tried? Asterisk does some things phenomenally well but some other things it just can't do. Irregardless I think this is the trend in telephony going forward. In this market cost consciousness is the leading concern on any deal and the opensource solutions address those concerns very well. However not all systems are created equal. I tried Trixbox for almost a year and couldn't get the zaptel drivers to compile correctly and just gave up on Fonality all together. The biggest issue i've run into on Asterisk is any type of analog integration is cludgy and a pain in the ass. When you deploy all sip phones and sip trunks its a dream compared to any key/pbx system i've ever installed. Unfortunately SIP is still the wild wild west right now but make no mistake this technology is where we are heading. Just take a look at Europe.

So actually, are you guys saying that there will be/are different versions of Asterisk that are/will be completely incompatible. You know, sorta like trying to slot NEC cards in an Avaya product, or use Panasonic proprietary phones on a Nortel? What goes around, comes around, huh! John C.

lightninghorse,

It's all SIP in the end. The endpoints are typically all polycom or aastra and will work on any distro that you choose. Asterisk is an opensource product that anybody can modify for their own use. That said and changes are supposed to be submitted back to the community so that everyone can benefit. This does not always happen. As far as interoperability all of these versions use the same protocols to communicate (IAX or SIP) with each other. The bigger issue who wants to spend the time or effort to smash two systems together that didn't cost anything in the first place. If it's free it has no value to the customer. What I am saying in the above post is that companies like NEC and Avaya and Nortel(are they still around?) have to wake up and adjust their pricing to reflect the real pressures out there in the market place. Customers aren't going out to buy 100k Cisco solutions when they're other avenues that cost a lot less.

The other week a friend of mine who owns a IT/computer repair shop (he throws me some cable jobs thru out the year) rang to tell me his old ESI with 8 phones & 4 CO's had finally died.

He said he was interested in voip, there was no point in me selling him a new TDM box as there would be a 4k up front cost so I told him to look on the internet for a hosted company.

He found a company called Jive, within 36hrs they had shipped him 8 polycom IP phones, forwarded his number to their temp trunks untill they can port it over, has vmail to email, web browser access....all the cool stuff you can do with voip.......his monthly cost is slightly less than what he was paying for his copper lines.......

I have stopped by a few times and made some test calls... the quality is very very good, HD quality in fact, this is probably due to having verizon Fios for biz (single mode fiber)


So thats small biz, now for large biz, we just cabled a bunch of offices for a national insurance company, they paid us to plug in polycom phones & a cisco router, all programing etc was done in house by their own IT dept.

Bottom line I think its getting increasingly harder to make money if you are a reseller of "traditional" pbx type box's.........

I can see a day when most enterpises just get ip phones sent to them and they plug them in themselves............or by their own IT dept.

Avalon,

I think you are correct as well.. tdm is the last hundred years voip is the next hundred years. Guys will start implementing voip or they will be out of business in a few years. The hosted solutions can be a crap shoot. There are two distinct disadvantages to going that route.

1.If you lose the wan connection you have a great paperweight on your desk. You can't even call the guy in the next office.

2.You never own any equipment except for the phones. Most hosted solutions are a per month per extension subscription. Great if you're selling hosted not so great if you're buying hosted. You just pay and pay and pay...

There are still plenty of people out there in the 4x8 world that need a little key system, and we'll keep on selling them. But most of the new deals coming down the pike are all wanting the capability that voip can provide and tdm can't.

cheers

That said they are nice for customers that only plan on being in one spot for a short period of time... like construction companies. Or customers who hire employees on a contract basis like H&R Block around tax season.

"If you lose the wan connection you have a great paperweight on your desk. You can't even call the guy in the next office"

yes but with hosted or big biz centralized voip, if they loose the WAN connection the person calling them is still going to hit the auto attendant and leave a vmail as this is all hosted in a data center many miles away

as for cost of hosted i reckon the price per mth per phone has almost halved since say 2005.

Hosted can be fine on two main conditions: Bandwidth and the host. Bottom line is if you have slow bandwidth you have bad service. If you go cheap on the host and it is a no-body company trying to host out of their garage on limited bandwidth you will have bad service. Unfortunately 95% of the customers on hosted fall into one of both of those categories.

Steve

I don't see Asterisk as nothing but proprietary. Asterisk is great system that can be programmed and modified by the individual programmer. God help anyone that follows THAT programmer(s) after the fact, of a heavily modded Asterisk system. It kinda reminds me of the 70's and 80's with all the competing operating systems Fortan 77, Pascal etc where you would hire a programming team to make an app for you and God help you if they went away after they were done.

avalon,

Don't get me wrong hosted works great as long as you have a T 10ms off the backbone that's bulletproof. Unfortunately most people buying hosted solutions are doing it in small office environments over a cable connection or ADSL. This ALWAYS ends badly for the customer experience. I have yet to hear a single SMB customer tell me how much they love their hosted solution. But I do agree the cost has come way down and as long as you have a diesel network and the provider is using a good backend like broadsoft, hosted can work out great. There just isn't enough residual income from selling the hosted product to make up for all the bitching and complaining from the customer.

Packetsmasher, I would agree with that, when ever I have done Hosted on Cable or DSL you get problems. When ever I have done it on Dedicated T1 or Verizon Fios it works very well.

Something that our Big Biz customers IT dept insist on is having a totally seperate physical LAN for the Voip phones, ie dedicated POE switch, and dedicated Cat5e cable.

Even though all Voip phones like the polycom are a 2 port switch and can piggyback on the same cat5 as the PC, I think in most small biz LAN's you can underestimate the effects of somebody pulling a large file from the server & what effects that has on Voip.

I tried Trixbox for about 5 minutes. Then I gave up on it, installed Debian, then downloaded Asterisk and compiled it along with the Zaptel drivers with no issues.

Using a canned distribution of Asterisk wasn't going to teach me what I wanted to learn about it.

It works here (my house) at least as well as the Panasonic KXT308 box it replaced. I'm using single-line phones connected to Linksys PAP2 adapters. They support sending caller-ID to analog phones. They also support CPC. Very few PBXs support CPC on station ports (talk battery drops for 1 second or so when remote party disconnects). Those two features alone make it better than the Panasonic KXT308 box--it supports neither.

About the only thing that the Linksys PAP2 doesn't support is rotary dialing, but the Zaptel card does.

I'm using one POTS trunk and one SIP trunk. The majority of my calls go through the POTS trunk (connected to the Zaptel card).

Biggest issue I've had thus far is that the Ethernet switch I was using to connect the PAP2s to the Asterisk box turned out to be flaky, so I replaced it with another and it's been fine since.

The PAP2s are on their own completely separate network, by the way.

I dont understand how a business owner who would never trust there business to an open source operating system over Windows

But they will trust there communications to an open source PBX ?

Actually alot of businesses use linux on the server side. It is very stable. Linux as a desktop replacement is another thing entirely. The gui interface is still not quite ready for primetime and apps such as microsoft office etc. don't run on it. Running asterisk on linux is quite stable and in the hands of a professional is very robust. Even most "traditional" pbx manufacturers are running linux(I know, it's not astersik) on much of their adjunct equipment if not on the system itself.

My Asterisk installation has been online since the 1st of April and has handled about 1800 phone calls since then (according to the call detail record), both internal and external calls.

The Asterisk box itself has been up for 107 days. I last took it down to plug it into a UPS.

I'd have to agree with this. We just completed a 9-month project to convert, internally, to VoIP with Asterisk. 46 extensions using Cisco SPA50xG phones over SIP, spread across four separate locations around town that are connected via 5.8GHz wireless bridges. All 21 incoming lines are POTS lines from the CO that plug in to the Asterisk server via TDM2400P card.

We took our time and built the Linux machine multiple times until we had a stable, documented repeatable configuration, and did the same with Asterisk. The dialplan, in fact all configuration, is under change control and review. The machine is stable, the phones work, and the users are happy. The switch is currently handling about 800 calls a day. If we ever find a reliable ITSP, we'll switch to incoming SIP or IAX2 trunks.

I don't think the Asterisk implementation saved us much, if any, money over one of the commercial (read Cisco) providers because of all the time we put into building it, but, we do have full control over it, and we don't have to pay any license fees to expand the configuration. And, we're not chained to any proprietary equipment or configurations. We're currently playing with a couple of SNOM desk sets because someone liked the look of them. Even the TDM2400P can be replaced with card(s) from another vendor.

Over the long run it may be less expensive, but, at least for our purpose, we love the full control we have over the beast. As a bonus we have a couple volumes of 'Standard Practices' to make troubleshooting and further implementations easier for anyone who takes over in the future.

msheldon, it seems you might have spent too much time and money just to get the asterix stable and in the end the Cisco phone flashed to sip and connected to asterix will never carry the features that most IP enabled systems will including Cisco ...

Your boss might have been better served to go with a proven telephone system (Full ip or not)installed by telephone professionals.

I guarantee the initial AND yearly cost of a proven system installed and maintained by professionals compared to Paying you and the rest of the IT staff to post in forums all day (just to get the asterix to do basic stuff) would be a huge savings...

www.telcom1.net: Did I write something in that post to offend you in some way? Was there a personal attack in there that I missed?

So basically, just to be sure I understand, you're saying that:

1. I am not a professional
2. I am somehow wasting my employer's time and money by coming to this forum...from home.
3. I am incompetent in that the Asterisk system we installed is somehow lacking some desired feature or set of features that a real professional phone system installed by a competent phone professional, like you, could provide. Please provide examples so I can see where I went wrong and fix things.
4. I was not able to get Asterisk to perform basic functions without a lot of help.
5. My specific Asterisk installation and the server that it runs on were unstable until I spent an inordinate amount of time to make them stable?
6. For some reason I had to 'flash' the Cisco phones to enable SIP functionality.
7. I have no clue what I am doing without lots of help from 'telephone professionals' like you on this, and other forums.

Or maybe you jumped to a bunch of conclusions without having the first clue about whom, and what you are commenting on.

I'll be sure and pass this on to my boss. You're comments are an excellent, excellent example of your professional attitude and ethics. I'm sure, based on your post, the administration will want to hire you immediately. Maybe you'd even allow me to follow you around and learn how to be a 'real telephone professional'.

I was simply trying to say that with the application of good solid, fundamental engineering practices, Asterisk can be just as reliable, and provide the same feature set, as any of the commercial offerings from big-name vendors. It's not the system that matters as much as the people who install it and manage it. I'm proud of the fact that we took our time and did it right. And in the end we have a lot more flexibility, with lower cost, than we would with any packaged offering.

This is a real nice place. Glad I posted and gave telcom1 a chance to set me straight.

Don't take it to heart msheldon..He is just saying it seems like you spent a long time reinventing the wheel. 9 months for 46 extensions and 4 locations makes veins pop in some guys brains. Most of the established systems we sell and service implement this in a couple of days so it just strikes some as strange to have such an involved long term project. If it works for your facilities then all is good. Keep up your input about your results and remember not all here are from the same school of thought. Look forward to hear what new features you develop.

Thanks, I understand what you are saying.

Just so all understand where my head is and what my school of thought is. I'm not trying to offend or insult, this is just the way I attack my job.

We were dealing with a lot of complicated, interrelated systems with this implementation. The microwave links alone were tested for 4 months before we put them in production. The goal is 99.999% reliability. Right?

The vendor says 45Mbps throughput at any distance up to the limit, but what about fog, rain, and snow? How does the radio tolerate a lightning strike? How do the phones perform when the staff at location B decides to send 4 Gigabytes of data back to location A...during a snow storm? At the same time, the entire staff is conferenced for a staff meeting and somebody just slid off the road and hit the utility pole holding the radio and knocked it 3 degrees off of vertical. We know what kind of performance to expect now, and more important, so does management. Plus, we're not paying for leased lines anymore. We own the network. And I never want to climb another antenna mast or utility pole again in my life.

In my mind, only a very reckless person would install equipment without fully testing, documenting, and understanding every feature, fault, and behavior. If it breaks, and it always does, we need to know how to diagnose it and repair it, immediately. And if I get hit by a bus and it breaks, the janitor has to be able to reach for my documentation and be able to diagnose it, repair it, and keep things running until I get out of the body-cast.

I learned computers with Unix, I've been using Linux since 1995, and Asterisk, as a hobby, since about 2003. I've installed Linux literally hundreds of times for production services. But the server wouldn't go into production until we could repeat a documented install and configuration that was identical to the three before it, by two different people. We also know what it will take to knock it over. When we inherited the Partner II switch that we just replaced, we beat on it for several weeks until we knew exactly how to configure it and how each change would affect all the users. We also know what it will take to knock it over and how to recover from that. And my first job in telecommunications was installing Partner systems for an AT&T contractor in Denver in the mid-eighties.

I'm not married to Asterisk. We looked at Cisco and 3Com and a couple other vendors that slip my mind right now. The event that pushed us to the open source solution, and popped a lot of veins in a lot of heads, was when we discovered that we'd have to pay about $2,500.00 for twenty additional voice mailbox licenses and the ability to handle FOUR simultaneous calls in the automated attendant on the Partner system. As the boss said "$2,500.00! For a tape recorder!".

I also assumed that it would be understood that the whole time we were working on this conversion, we were still providing full-time service to all of our users. It's not like we got 9 months of isolation in a lab before we unleashed this beast.

I didn't take it to heart. I also don't think I re-invented the wheel either. I think I was just being responsible and disciplined in performing the job I was hired to do. I think my employer would agree. It's my reputation at stake. Would any of you do it any differently?

I understand the hostility towards the shady operators out there. Especially when one of those shady operators can slide in the back door with a shiny new VoIP brochure and take work away from you with a few sexy buzzwords, cool looking new high-tech phones, and absolutely no idea what reliable and dependable service mean. They can sell it and install it and then blame the ITSP when it doesn't work right because they know their equipment's not at fault. Besides they're now busy with the next victim.

I just learned about a group called C*NET, or Collector's Net, today. This is a group of people who are using old equipment with Asterisk as tandems to create a private global telecommunications network. As a hobby! I was browsing the listings this afternoon and once I hook my Asterisk switch up to this network I can dial an extension in someone's living room in London. And the extension is connected to a 1A2 system he's installed in his house. There are even private 5ess and old CO SxS systems connected to this network. That same person in London could connect to a DISA extension in my Asterisk switch and access a local dialtone in my tiny little town in Southern Colorado. Maybe it's just me, but I think that's pretty damn neat. Sure it's possible to do it without Asterisk, but Asterisk makes it really easy to do. I plan on making my first C*NET call with an old WE500 rotary that I found in my grandfather's garage and got working on one of the FXS ports on my Asterisk server. It wasn't really hard to do, but I was kind of jazzed when it worked anyway. Just like I was jazzed when I delivered dialtone from an FXS port to a house across town over a BANA circuit just to see if I could.

For me, Asterisk has been a lot of fun to play with. And because I've been playing with it for a while, I know what it can and can't do. And in this particular case, it happened to be the right tool for the job. It might never be the right choice again in the future, but for now I've staked my reputation on it. If it falls over, so do I.

I should mention that I'm a contractor too. I'm tired of it and I'm hoping to convert my current contract to a full-time position. My employer's not stupid, they looked at all the bids for this monster and made a choice. I'm not stupid either. I didn't promise a bunch of cost savings by going with VoIP and Asterisk. It's true that I don't have to pay license fees for features I shouldn't have to pay for in the first place, I can add all the voice mailboxes I want to, or extensions I want to. I'm only limited by the cost of the phones, available hard drive space, memory, and processor speed. I also don't have to pay license fees for protocols (read SIP) that are open standards and shouldn't be licensed in the first place. But I still have to pay for the same CO lines. We're in a VERY rural area and a PRI is about $900.00 a month, and a T1, well, I don't even want to mention that. I haven't found a really reliable ITSP that can deliver the same quality and reliability I get from the PSTN for the promised savings. There is a Colorado based vendor that comes close, but they still go down a lot more often than the PSTN. We have a couple of IAX2 trunks for backup, just in case, but ITSP's aren't ready for prime time around here. At any rate, there's not much chance of me getting hired if the boss feels like I spent too much money or the phone system doesn't work.

Sorry, I really didn't mean to ramble on like this. Thanks for lending me the soap box.

Gentlemen. I want a good clean fight. Stay above the belts and no sucker punches.

On another note, welcome to the board. I suggest you not take things too personal as everyone here can be quite opinionated on various things. Staying in form with my little boxing intro I'd suggest you just roll with the punches while trying not to dish out too many of your own. The collective assembly of knowledge here far surpasses any manual or certificate anyone has.

Opinionated? Who? Us? Welcome to the family!

It's all good. I should know better than to post when I'm tired.

We've have been installing iProphet for three years now. These are the same guys that developed the ProphetVoice voice mail system. The same system as the NVM voice mail for NEC. Albeit, a very robust and dependable system.

The iProphet SIP phone system is equally as outstanding. SIP trunks are easy to install and beats the pants off of PRI. Not all SIP providers are good. We learned who was good and who was bad. SIP providers pop up like zits on teenagers...beware.

We were fighting this technology shift as we were a big Nortel, Samsung and NEC house. This was difficult at the beginning to accept especially since the first Generation of SIP solutions seemed to be written by IT guys without a clue of Telecom. I can say without hesitation that we have NO issues with nearly 100 installations ranging from 6 users to 75 users. Oh, and the networking between systems is a breath of fresh air.

My 2 cents...

Not to sound too crass, but it sounds like iProphet is just another management GUI wrapped around Asterisk. I am sure it does things better (or worse) then other distros as well. Granted the biggest inroad for everyone initially is learning how to configure things.

It just all goes back to an analogy I've used before with Asterisk. Think of it more like a Home Depot store. While all the tools and materials are there for everyone to use, it's all about what materials you use and how you build with them that counts.

In terms of the asterisk distros (Trixbox, Elastix, iProphet, etc) out there, I would equate them to buying a house that has been framed and roughed in, and you just have to do the finish work.

Most people get those analogies pretty well, and it communicates what Asterisk is nicely.

I love it when you talk to us like that, James.

Yeah well, I try not to church it up too much for you telephone guys

Hi msheldon,

Seems we both been using asterisk for a number of years but you have done your share of commercial installs. My question to you is, what STABLE version of asterisk are you using on what hardware?

I have run 1.4 but need to upgrade because there is a BIG issue with it deregistering all voip phones if the firewall/dsl/isp goes down. In that case, you could not even make a local call to another office phone if you asterisk box is in the same building. Also, what asterisk card are you using?

Thanks

Since this post is at least 2 months old, you might have better luck starting a new topic.