Friday, February 06, 2004
VOIP meets Open Source (talk about weapons of mass (creative) destruction)
I just got this from Benjamin Kowarsch (benjamin at sunrise-tel dot com):
I have started [a new] company here in Tokyo, integrating open source based VoIP-PBXes for SMEs. Every time we deploy another system, I think of your "stupid network" philosophy since I used to do this kind of thing with "intelligent network" technology at about a hundred times the effort and a thousand times the cost ;-)Benjamin explains he's using Asterisk software, which runs on operating systems whose names end in "x" -- including Mac OS-X. He continues,
All you need is an old PC (ie a 500 MHz Celeron with about 192MB of RAM), install Linux or BSD, download, install and configure Asterisk, then get one or more VoIP phones, either softphones such as X-Lite (free download at http://www.xten.com) or real VoIP phones such as the Grandstream Budgetones for ca. $65 a piece (http://www.grandstream.com/y-product.htm) and you have got a SOHO VoIP network. The quality is quite often significantly better than what you get from many international carriers who charge you an arm and a leg.In my mind, Mike Powell's, "I realized it was all over when I downloaded Skype," keeps playing, over and over. VOIP meets Open Source -- surely the ILECs and Microsoft will find a way to make this illegal, immoral and unpatriotic.
[Making this work in] a business environment is a bit of work and most SMEs don't have the expertise nor the resources to do it themselves, so that is where we come in . . .
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