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

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.