A TELEPHONY REVOLUTION

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people’s minds.

—Samuel Adams

An incredible revolution is under way. It has been a long time in coming, but now that it has started, there will be no stopping it. It is taking place in an area of technology that has lapsed embarrassingly far behind every other industry that calls itself hightech.
The industry is telecommunications, and the revolution is being fueled by an open source Private Branch eXchange (PBX) called Asterisk™. Telecommunications is arguably the last major electronics industry that has remained untouched by the open source revolution.* Major telecommunications manufacturers still build ridiculously expensive, incompatible systems, running complicated, ancient code on impressively engineered yet obsolete hardware. As an example, Nortel’s Business Communications Manager kludges together a 15 year-old Key Telephone Switch and a 1.2 GHz Celeron PC.† All this can be yours for between $5,000 and $15,000, not including telephones. If you want it to actually do anything interesting, you’ll have to pay extra licensing fees for closed,  limitedfunctionality, shrink-wrapped applications. Customization? Forget it—it’s not in the plan. Future technology and standards compliance? Give them a year or two—they’re working on it. All of the major telecommunications manufacturers offer similar-minded products. They don’t want you to have flexibility or choice; they want you to be locked in to their product cycles. * Until now. † To its credit, Nortel finally got rid of Windows NT 4.0 and installed Linux. Technically a good idea, but rather odd, given that Nortel and Microsoft recently announced a partnership to develop enterprise telecom applications together.

Asterisk changes all of that. With Asterisk, no one is telling you how your phone system should work, or what technology you are limited to. If you want it, you can have it. Asterisk lovingly embraces the concept of standards compliance, while also enjoying the freedom to develop its own innovations. What you choose to implement is up to you. Asterisk imposes no limits. Naturally, this incredible flexibility comes with a price: Asterisk is not a simple system to configure. This is not because it’s illogical, confusing, or cryptic; to the contrary, it is very sensible and practical. People’s eyes light up when they first see an Asterisk dialplan and begin to contemplate the possibilities. But when there are literally thousands of ways to achieve a result, the process naturally requires extra effort. Perhaps it can be compared to building a house: the components are relatively easy to understand, but a person contemplating such a task must either

a) enlist competent help or
b) develop the required skills through instruction, practice, and a good book on the subject.
 

Bridging the Gap Between Traditional and Network

While Voice over IP (VoIP) is often thought of as little more than a method of obtaining free long-distance calling, the real value (and—let’s be honest—challenge as well) of VoIP is that it allows voice to become nothing more than another application in the data network.
It sometimes seems that we’ve forgotten that the purpose of the telephone is to allow people to communicate. It is a simple goal, really, and it should be possible for us to make it happen in far more flexible and creative ways than are currently available to us. Since the industry has demonstrated an unwillingness to pursue this goal, a large community of passionate people have taken on the task.  The challenge comes from the fact that an industry that has changed very little in the last century shows little interest in starting now.