“Dial D For Disruption†– Article on Asterisk from Forbes Magazine
*We found this article very inspiring and informative that we hope Forbes won’t mind we post it in our blog. :)* View the Source: http://www.forbes.com/free_forbes/2006/0410/063.html Dial D for Disruption Quentin Hardy 04.10.06 Want to build a phone company for $100? Give Mark Spencer a ring. In a research park outside the low-key bustle of downtown Huntsville, Ala. Mark Spencer finishes his barbecue and resumes wreaking havoc on the multibillion-dollar phone equipment business. Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone. With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco (nasdaq: CSCO – news – people ), Nortel or Avaya (nyse: AV – news – people ). “We have to figure out ways to get into everything: Carriers, businesses, equipment companies,” says Spencer. “For better or worse, I don’t tend to think small.” Spencer, who is all of 29 years old, is poised to disrupt the $7 billion market for office telecom switches (often called PBXs) much the way the Linux open-source computer operating system crushed the price of business computing and brought woe to established leaders such as Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ) and Sun Microsystems (nasdaq: SUNW – news – people ). Since Spencer released Asterisk to the world in 1999 as a phone operating system, it has been downloaded 500,000 times, and it continues to be downloaded 1,000 times per day. Some 350 contributors have taken it from a rocky voice system to one with clear calling and more than 100 features. Electric utility Southern Co. is using Asterisk in a pilot program to translate voicemail into text messages for 30 managers’ BlackBerrys. The town of Manchester, Conn. is about to begin using Asterisk to run an application tied to the 911 service that will cost less than $1 million, half the price it would have paid had it used traditional phone equipment, and at 10% of the operating costs. Outsourcing company Sutherland Global Services has tested Asterisk in 400-person call centers, finding it cuts telephone costs by two-thirds. In Rensselaer, Ind. computer science professor Brian Capouch has built a commercial-class phone system that already touches 20 communities and covers more than 1,000 square miles with just $100 in personal computer equipment and $125 to customize each location. For a little more he built an Asterisk system of motion detectors and Web cameras that send video to his office laptop and can call any phone when something happens at his house. One of his students created a business sending other kids automated wake-up calls. Other Asterisk hacks include a way to pay your parking meter by phone. “You couldn’t set out to build a system like this. No one company could do it all. When you open source, people just keep improving things,” says Spencer. Asterisk could lead to the creation of thousands of businesses, as people begin thinking about the phone the same way they saw the personal computer in 1980, as a platform on which to build. Spencer had this in mind when he named his software after the symbol used in Unix computer programming to signify “everything.” Digium, the company Spencer created in 1999, now has 50 employees and more than $10 million in revenue from selling hardware loaded with a tested business edition of the otherwise free Asterisk, much the way Red Hat (nasdaq: RHAT – news – people ) charges for a widely used standard for Linux. Digium makes a profit, though Spencer won’t say how much. Overhead is low. Spencer pays less than $15 a square foot for space (per year) and does up his own quarters in geek chic: reworked computer guts, testing screens, a fridge filled with caffeinated sodas and a sculpture he made of a robot holding a rotary phone. He shares his office with a 23-year-old programmer who was still a teen when they met. Spencer once had to write a note to his principal years ago when a job conflicted with the school day. Spencer’s parents are professors at Auburn University (his American father teaches education, his Egyptian mother French). In eighth grade he wrote a grading program for his teacher and sold it for $5. While still in high school, Spencer hung around Auburn’s electrical engineering department, designing integrated circuit structures for fun. “I’d go over to his house [to discuss semiconductors] and he’d be finishing writing a symphony on his synthesizer,” says Thaddeus Roppel, an Auburn professor and early mentor. “He kept up with his high school homework, too.” While on a full scholarship at Auburn, Spencer started Digium as a Linux consultant. He sold one-seventh of the firm for $500,000 to Adtran, a Huntsville telecom equipment maker where he had interned two years before. He wanted a really cool phone switch to handle sales orders, but when he learned that it would cost $10,000, he began writing Asterisk. “I’d never touched a traditional pbx,” Spencer says. But he knew a ton about open-source software, whose source code is given away in order to attract improvements. He had earlier built an instant-messaging client called Gaim, which has become popular among the open-source crowd. Spencer based Asterisk on Apache (nyse: APA – news – people ), the freebie software that powers many a Web server. Aided by a couple of Internet telephone veterans, he put the telephone switch at the center of the operating system and made it possible to connect it to almost any Internet phone system (except Skype). Asterisk was still a hobby until the spring of 2001, when the tech crash killed Digium’s Linux business. Spencer saw there was interest in Net phones and shifted gears. By the end of the year Digium was selling
Choosing a VoIP Gateway
A crucial decision for any person doing VoIP is selecting your VoIP Gateway. This organization will be the one providing you your route back to the analog telephone world from the world of VoIP telephony. They’re sometimes referred to as A2Z termination as they typically will provide you access to call EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY on Earth at cheaper rates than calling Long Distance! There are of course the popular ones such as Vonage, Net2phone, etc…but guess what…there are probably Hundreds if not Thousands of gateways to choose from already. So here are some tips: Shop Around for Costs. Most gateways will post the rates they offer. These rates vary depending on where they’re located and their target market. Find one with the cheapest rates to the destination you’re likely to be calling most! Try before you Buy! Most gateways will offer you a few minutes free. So start registering to different gateways and compare the voice quality. Note that VoIP gateways are not created equal! Some will have lousy connections over cheap bandwidths. Determine your Latency to the Server. One of the worst disadvantages of VoIP is latency. Basically this is due to the distance your voice has to travel to your server, onwards to the other party and then back again. An easy way to check this is to ‘ping’ the provider you’re evaluating. A good rule of thumb is that Latency should not be more than 200ms. Also, good practive would be to have a VoIP gateway ‘near’ the primary region you intend to call. For example, if you need to call Japan often, it doesn’t make sense to go with a Europe-based gateway…as the signal goes all the way around the world before going back to Japan. Research the company. Since deploying a VoIP gateway has become so cheap, it would pay to research the company your looking to go with. Make sure they have a track record and are not fly by night operations. Although since this is a young industry, you might find it difficult…a rule you can follow is to go with businesses that have other services/products…e.g. a lot of NEW gateways are also OLD ISP’s. Thus, you have a proxy track record you can base your decision on. Don’t tie yourself up longterm. As mentioned, this is a young industry. Eventually the players will consolidate and the market leaders will emerge. Thus, it wouldn’t be wise to commit to a company and find out you betted on the wrong horse a year down the line. Keep your options open, jump from provider to provider if you wish or have subscriptions to multiple providers! Most providers offer call as you go accounts, hence you can have $10 here and $10 there and have no long term or heavy investment in one player. I’m sure I’ll think of more tips later. But these should be enough to start you on your GoogleQuest. 🙂
TigerNetcom Telephony Adapters
In the course of our research on Asterisk compatible devices, we encountered these two very nice devices from a small Startup Shenzen Company: TigerNetCom. Gate 103 The Gate 103 is similar to the Linksys PAP2 or the more recent SPA2002. It’s a dual FXS port Analog Telephone Adapter or ATA. It supports SIP protocol and a the usual codecs you’d expect (G711,G729, etc…). Removing all the technicalities, you can use it to connect 2 “normal” analog phones to the world of VoIP. Still doing testing on its reliability, but so far so good. It’s pretty stable, has a nice web interface and an easy to use phone-based configuration. It’s very affordable, and would probably retail at around US$80.00. It has IP passthrough so you save on setting up another line to your switch as well. GATE 104 The GATE 104, although practically exactly in appearance as the 103 is by far the superior product. It has one FXS and one FXO port. This means, if you have this at home, and you have a friend in another country, that friend can call this device’s FXO port and he will get a dial tone in YOUR Country, thus saving him IDD Charges. ALSO, your other friends in your own country can call your phone number, get a dialtone, and they’re connected to the VoIP network and the world of 1 cent/minute calling! I don’t know about you guys, but I find that simply fantastic! As it lets your friends with no broadband or VoIP capability benefit from your VoIP connection! A similar ‘high-end’ device would be the Linksys SPA3000 which offers the same functionality at a bit of a higher price. VERDICT? Both devices are excellent low-cost alternatives to the more popular brands. Both use Texas Instruments chipsets (not China-made ones) and thus some reliability can be expected. Voice quality is better than most IP phones we’ve tested. Go out and buy one if you can! Or visit http://www.tigernetcom.com and resell them in your neck of the woods!
Yuxin YWH500 IP Phone
Very affordable, decent looking IP Phone. For Manufacturer’s Specifications: http://www.yntx.com/en/productywh500.htm Our Take on it: Based on the ARED Fox PA1688 Chipset which also powers ATCOM, ARTDIO, and other phones (as far as we can tell). Native SIP Support. Supposedly supports Power over Ethernet…haven’t tested though. Supports IP pass-through, which saves you the need of an extra port available in your switch. Excellent Codec/protocol support Asterisk IAX protocol support via firmware update Has all the expected features of a pbx phone Tends to “hang” sometimes, particularly if you put it in static IP Value for money Verdict: We’d recommend it as a way to introduce yourself to VoIP telephony. We have serious doubts with its long-term reliability, but it looks sturdy enough. Enterprise grade solutions would do well to go with the “known” brands for an additional $20-$40 such as Linksys, Polycom, etc…
Asterisk – the Open Source PBX
No blog about VoIP would be complete without mentioning Asterisk. And you’ll find the a lot of the postings you’ll be seeing here is asterisk-related/asterisk-compatible technologies. Why? Because Asterisk is the reason why VoIP is now accessible not to big call centers, not to telcos, not to closed services like skype, but to EVERYONE. Asterisk is OPEN SOURCE, meaning anyone and everyone can download it, use it, and even contribute to its further development. Asterisk open architecture ensures that it’s compatible with almost any system out there, and with the help of Digium it gives anyone affordable access to the traditional phone system. Using Asterisk your run of the mill computer becomes a full-featured, VoIP-enabled, Enterprise-Grade PBX! And the great thing about it? It’s VERY EASY to set it up! Asterisk is doing to Telecommunications what Apache Server did to Web Services and Linux did to operating systems. It will no doubt leave a huge influence on how the Telecommunications business is structured and operates. They may not admit it, BUT I AM SURE your traditional telcos, and even traditional VoIP system providers are scoffing at Asterisk publicly but playing around with it privately. Here are a couple of links to help you along the way of fully understanding this newest Disruptive Technology: http://www.asterisk.org – home of the asterisk project http://www.digium.com – original makes of TDM cards compatible with asterisk http://www.voip-info.org – Excellent Wiki of and about VoIP, a bit technical, but EXCELLENT http://asteriskathome.sourceforge.net – Excellent way to get you started with asterisk. Burn the application in CD, insert in an old computer, and have asterisk running and functional in less than and hour! http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/01/13/how_to_asterisk_pbx/ – Very interesting project for the geek in all of us. Run asterisk as an embedded appliance!