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

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.