September 2005
Intermediate to advanced
408 pages
16h 20m
English
Content preview from Asterisk: The Future of TelephonyBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1. 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 high-tech. The industry is telecommunications, and the revolution is being fueled by an open source Private Branch eXchange (PBX) called Asterisk TM.
Telecommunications is arguably the last major electronics industry that has (until now) 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 Windows NT 4.0 server, a 15-year-old VXWorks-based Key Telephone Switch, and a 700-MHz PC. All this can be yours for between 5 and 15 thousand dollars, not including telephones. If you want it to actually do anything interesting, you’ll have to pay extra licensing fees for closed, limited-functionality, 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 ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.