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.