Do you consider Asterisk to be a possible long term reliable phone switch ?
I you have been using Asterisk for your organisation, what experience did it bring you ? In case you are considering to changing your voice infrastructure, do you consider Asterisk as an equal solution ?
Eddy
Answers (5)
No.
It *IS* a long term reliable phone switch.
Within the limitations of the poor quality of hardware that is PCs (vs what a phone switch and extensions are)
Edward E
Principal at Eigerman Consulting, Inc.
Best Answers in: Wireless (5), Computers and Software (4), Software Development (2), Offshoring and Outsourcing (1), Enterprise Software (1), Computer Networking (1), Telecommunications (1)
To be petty about distinctions, it's not a switch, it's a PBX. A switch is something housed at teleco provider that "switches" calls from the origin to the destination. There are open source switch projects, but Asterisk isn't one of them.
Asterisk is ready for prime time as a PBX, but it's no magic bullet. And unlike a purpose-built PBX you have to plan out the redundancy, the back-up and the interconnect yourself.
The biggest issues I've had implementing it have been 1) people are very cheap about bandwidth, you really can't share your SOHO DSL connection between your 10 phone lines and normal internet activity. Also clients know only one metric for network access, and that's bandwidth. I've had clients with great bandwidth and really bad latency and they just don't get why their call quality sucks. 2) Most PC servers are designed to be five-9s, that is available 99.999% of the time. Desktops even less. And five-9s isn't nearly good enough for phones. Five nines means several hours of down time a year and people expect much more from their phone systems, in general.
I built two Asterisk as a Office PBX with Vocie Mail, Follow Me, Meet Me (Conference Call), Call Forwarded. features with 1.5 SDSL using g729 codec. Each office supported more than 10 IP phones without any problem or any down times for more than 1 years. The Asterisk GUI interface from FreePBX make it very easy to configure and install. The main probelm really related to the bandwidth usage.
Asterisk is a great opensource product for iPBX with many different features and many support from the community.
Links:
Anders J
Lead Enterprise Architect at Barclays
Best Answers in: Public Relations (2), Starting Up (1), Enterprise Software (1), Using LinkedIn (1)
Anders J suggests this expert on this topic:
Equal? Better! We have been using Trixbox (Asterisk-based) for 4 months and it is fantastic. We are a small company (20 extensions) and TrixBox/Asterisk has given us all the features of a $10,000 PBX for the cost of a Linux server ($2000) and some phones ($1000). Our phone bills have been reduced to 10% of what they were prior to implementation.
The installation has been - touching wood - very reliable so far.
Clarification added September 18, 2007:
On the reliability front, we ordered an HP rack server with redundant disks, power supplies, fans and network cards to reduce the chances of disruptive server hardware failures (see the five-9s comments above).
