Asterisk: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition

Chapter 23. Asterisk: A Future for Telephony

Hey, I just met you,

And this is crazy,

But here’s my number,

So call me, maybe?

Carly Rae Jepsen

We have arrived at the final chapter of this book. We’ve covered a lot (and this book has been massively modified over the years), but we hope that we have made it clear that we’ve merely scratched the surface of Asterisk. To wrap things up, we want to spend some time exploring what we might see from Asterisk and open source telephony in the near future.

When we wrote the first edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, we confidently asserted that open source communications engines such as Asterisk would cause a shift in thinking that would transform the telecommunications industry. In many ways, our belief has been proven correct; however, some might argue it was a hollow victory, because what has also happened during that time is a shift away from telecommunications as a primary real-time communications medium. Younger generations have little or no use for telephone calls, and consider them disruptive, annoying, and in some cases even rude.

So, even as Asterisk ushered in a transformed age for the telecommunications industry, it has now become the standard-bearer for technologies that many say are as good as dead.

While there can be no doubt that the telephone is no longer the primary communications technology in the world (not by a long shot!), when we distill communications down to their essence, we find there may be a future for this stuff ...