Episode: 336
Title: HPR0336: Asterisk
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0336/hpr0336.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 16:39:40

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規則訊息
Hello everybody and welcome to another episode. In this episode we're going to talk about
asterisk, the open source PBX server. I'm Mark Clark, I'm from South Africa and I'm
an open source developer and solution provider. I'm joined by Darlene from Canada, Hard
Darlene. Hi Mark, how are you this week? Alright, thanks.
We'll just maybe we can start with, you know, what asterisk is, per se. Mark, would you like to
start with that? No, let me do that. Patrick, as I said in the beginning is a open source
telephony server. It's also called a web server or RPTBX and essentially it is open source server
both in terms of its source code but also that it runs on standard or generic hardware which anybody
can implement which therefore you know makes it quite a disruptive technology and the PBX was
left in the market was very much a proprietary type of solution that normally gets provided there.
So it's very exciting and it's disrupting that whole industry and a lot of companies are switching
to it to save costs and increased productivity because there's lots of benefits to using asterisk
in business. I'm sure you'd come across them Darlene and you use asterisk? Yes, so in my company we use
an asterisk box. We've been using it for quite some time and some of the benefits that we found
were that we weren't reliant on outside sources. They can tell code for any enhancements or
management we needed of our services and we also have some redundancy built into our system
because we do have some copper lines coming in and then we move into the asterisk box.
As well we found it was very cost effective you know compared to the traditional models that
were offered by our telco because it seems on a business rates or three times what anything
residential would be and as well as a small business it allowed us to expand our phone capacity
with void lines along with our copper lines. So we found just and again that you know there were 99
percent of the features that we wanted but yet we were able to code the rest that we wanted
because we want to learn more about asterisk we got more adventurous. That's the thing for you
as asterisk it's extensible you know it's extensible in the sense that if you decide to add more
lines to your box you can just pop it open and put a new card. At all of your box you need a bigger
box to run asterisk on you can store you use the hardware or new box. So that's extensible that
sense which obviously says money in time and then also 16 so as you say and from a software
sense it has got a well-defined APR that you can then use to integrate into your applications
in your office or you know any third party application you can take advantage of it and it's
documented as well you know you have to sort of pay some tons of money just to just to the
integration for you. Okay so do you want to talk a little bit about what we felt with the hardware
requirements to set up an asterisk box in your office? Typically I mean we do quite a few
asterisk installations all the way from you know small offices SME type of PBX's
well the way to core centers of 20 to 50 seed core centers of the asterisk so it's very versatile
and inflexible. So you know what you do find is that the hardware requirements are actually quite
minimal. The main bottleneck is only the CPU because of all the codex translations that it has to
do you know quite a bit of CV but this memory and it doesn't have to be that much you can get about
400 megs of RAM but specifically you have a gig it's gig ram and they're to do all of the
handle the cores and everything and the hard disk really depends on how much recording you want to
do because if you're not going to do any voice recordings any voice man and stuff like that you
don't really need big hard disks but you know oh you can even use smaller disks if you're going to
sort of archive the like of the core centers that you call all the conversations you know in
case it's a bit later and all of those things and it is archived off in the evenings to another
machine. So yeah so it's actually quite modest what it's required to be you don't need to go and
spend you know a ton of money on actual hardware but typical expensive hardware is the
is the actual chords that you use when you integrate into the PSDN networks. So for example like
Digim the guards it actually you know develop estrics they make hard records that you can use
to interface with the PSDN networks you know both the BRR and for the ISDN lines and the PRR
ISDN line codes and those tend to be quite expensive compared to that's actually most expensive
piece of hardware that you have in the estrics box yeah but I mean apart from that it's normally
quite modest. Okay. What have you experienced what have you used? Well we use the Digim cards
we actually don't we don't use any aftermarket cards we order it from Digim but I thought we
can also talk about we can also talk about the other hardware that goes along with this it's the
SIP phones whether we want people like to use the soft phones on their computer on their PC
or do they realize that they can't use a regular phone any longer that they have to invest
into a SIP phone such as a polycom or a grand stream. Do you have any comments on that mark?
Like they look at it again. Well just that the cost can be can vary quite a bit you know.
I mean from my experience the grand stream we're very cost effective and we use them in our
office. I think I've had some feedback from myself that maybe their life expectancy wasn't
that great but we also use the polycoms. Okay and I really like really like it I actually have
also have a lintis phone that I use and actually it's probably the better what better models
have come across. Okay now look most of the course interests tend to use the soft phones
because they're cheaper and they're cost effective and really they've got computers
with the agent so they try and cut costs like that but then you know it's sort of what you
penny wise they have power and foolish as it were because what happens is often with the soft
phones is people change their configurations there's a lot of support issues around there
especially we've got people that are not too technical and typically you know of course
into agents on your technical so they change the settings on their phone and then next minute
it's all kinds of problems and it's also irritation because you know typically the pvx gets
playing for these problems when it's actually you know clan side and the system ammunition hasn't
locked down the machines properly so they set up the phones the soft phones wrong and it has problems
so hard phones are I mean typically better at that because then they you know they look
like phones people don't invest within that much and change their settings so hard phones are
good for that point of view but as you said they're horrendously expensive I mean the the
grand stream which is the cheapest sort of hard phones that we found what we found is at the
last about a year and then they break so you know you've had all that money for phone and it
doesn't work after a year and on the high end it's a very popular the soft phones just like if
where you go people use the user's thumb phones and you know sometimes using the people pay for
the soft phones especially bigger installations because you can do automatic provisioning of those
phones so if you have an installation with 300 phones you don't only have to go to each phone
and set up individually because that'll be painful so you have like a central server that will
automatically push out the settings to just like you know almost like a DHCP service pushes out
the settings to to work station so it pushes out to the phones so yeah so I do think that the
hard way in terms of the phones are can be quite expensive one potential middle ground is to
especially if you've got a client that's already got a PBX system to replacing it's not a RPE
PBX system to be replacing you can use the existing phones analog phones by buying these
ATI adapters and essentially the plug into that so the ATI that's not quite expensive but it's
cheaper than you know than the grand stream phones so you can reuse those all the phones on the
system so that's also something to consider when you when you're doing that so the main thing I
think is is you know talking about like hard to install asterix whatever you guys used to go
up as to install asterix we had asterix back in the day so we did all of our stuff by coding
there wasn't a CD or GUI install we did it by command line coding and it was yeah so it was
quite a bit of work and we were actually just discussing today we were thinking of having a
redundant box having moving to newer hardware and how we were going to do this and I have suggested
that we should look at elastic and do it with a CD install this time but we still find it's
going to be well I'll let you talk a little bit more before I go into the you know the other
side of installation and that's the configuration okay yeah I'm installing a few years ago
not that long ago really you know most installation is done for a source because Asterix
Cable is moving so fast and if you really wanted to get all the bugs off you have to install for
a source now there is most distributions of Asterix in the repositories so you can just
do get to a Yemen store and as you were saying there's all these distribution dedicate distributions
to Asterix now so you see there are no elastic is the one and we we tend to use elastic for
SME markets and stuff and then there's trick box trick box problem with them is I seem to have
got like this commercial start to them now which I think is basically alienating the community
and then there's also Digim started one as well put Asterix now which I haven't tried myself
because it was being in beta until I think recently I should just check I was still in beta
but I wasn't beta I haven't really used it but what we do do on the core center side
it's typically where configurations are quite simple because if it's a core center I mean I know
people hate core centers you know because I was training people and annoying them and stuff like that
but you know there's a lot of work in some ethical core centers and typically there you don't
need a guru because it's not like a fancy lot of commands actually this is either an outgoing
campaign or incoming campaign so it's quite it's quite simple but you know so within we tend to
just use a distribution like Ubuntu or or CentOS and we just install it from the repositories
because then we can do without degree tools because yeah we're going on to the configuration
just now but sometimes those tools can make things complicated underneath so you know I don't know
if you want to talk about what tools you used to to configure Asterix at all no actually I don't
have too much insight I did talk you know we were also today as a reviewing our plan forward
just talking about codex and I understand yeah so we were looking at somebody I guess there's
some that you pay for the codex per per line are you familiar with that Mark yeah there's a well
this the thing is is that there's a lot of free codecs aren't there you can use us okay to use
like ULOR and ALOR on your local network but when you start going on your web trunk you need to
use a codex that does a higher rate of compression the compression sort of quality
schedule and unfortunately the main one there is this GE729 codex which is patented so you have to
buy licenses whenever you use it so you need one for every every trunk that you're going to have
well it's a bit annoying as well because typically you need one on the on the server side
and on the client side and that's one thing a lot of these like hard phones come with a codex
already you know you really bother codex in the phone the GE729's on it but if you try and like
root over your internet connection with with the code it's not Ge729 often your your trunk
your work provider will just reject the call and also if you try anything else you normally have
voice quality issues and that because of compression and the frame rates and you know all that
translation between TCP RP and all of the voice translation that starts having a negative impact
on the on the quality of the call so yeah so it's not it's not a really sweet experience and I think
it's like I think it's $10 or something like that a one or something so it's not too expensive
it's not a significant cost but of that way and hopefully of course I hope the source community
manages to come up with something that can replace it in the wrong way okay but I just wanted to
bring that up because it isn't hard of you know some considerations on on installation and
configuration okay so we were going to talk go ahead Mark yeah it's going to say especially with
the often what you find happening is you have set up the web trunk and nothing works in the
owner why it's because you need to configure the extra box to actually use the codex and you have
to install the codex as well you know so these guys have the have the phone sending it in the wrong
encoded in the wrong format and then of course they're subjected to the web provider in the
owner why so yeah so often that can be an issue for troubleshooting as well if you're not a way
of that okay all right okay so let's let's move on a little bit here we'll just talk about
configuration of the system and we're going to talk about dial plans or
you know the ppx is to go ahead Mark let's fix I think the issue yeah is that there's
there's two ways to configure ashtricks is using like a GUI tool and using a command line tool
um you know to configure it have you used ppx before as a command line I mean as a GUI tool to
to configure ashtricks or to offer so not all do you tend to do it editing the dial plan manually
yeah we tend to do it manually so because we have that Linux background so we're comfortable
with the command line so depending on who is doing the configuration right that's for us we're
comfortable with the command line yeah and the command line is often the obviously the most
flexible way of doing it um but the the GUI tools what they do enable pppx I mean for me is a trade
of pppx is great because you can quickly set up a complex dark plan you know follow me's and
rvs and voicemails was clicking a few buttons um however the the negative trade of what that is that
you know pppx tends to have the undocumented one you know from Mark's experience
on all of us macros and it's modules and all those different um scripts that it uses so as soon
as you want to customize it manually even for all the pain um because you change it anytime
do the changes or change it every time you've got three ppx so you know it's a cost benefit thing
so if you're going to put an installation where the client's going to try to do a little bit of
administration adding extensions and that kind of stuff it's best to use three ppx but if you're
going to have a installation you have complete control over times better just to use the command
line like you guys are doing I mean it's just it's just have less hassles on the long line with it's
so now all right so now I understand that you can we can we configure with SIP now can you talk
about some of the other other ways of configuring uh asterisk like not everybody uses SIP
connections or SIP setup right um but I'm really really familiar with the with the SIP side of
things I mean it's just there's this protocol that uses to initiate the calls and do all the
signaling and all of that kind of stuff um so yeah so SIP I mean there's a protocol which is actually
independent of of asterisk it's not it's asterisk people can use SIP for kinds of things like I'm
sitting on video conferences and all this so yeah so it's quite apparent to you from yeah I'm
not a SIP expert at all apparently it's a very complicated protocol yeah yeah it is right so
are there any other protocols that you're aware well well for this way when you okay we're talking
about the ix protocol which is asterisk's own protocol for sending data between like web service
so you can like let's say you you have an office because the bigger also when we work can cut a lot
across in business and stuff it's like if you have a like office head office and you have regional
offices and then the regional offices you know have a web server that can connect over the internet
to your head office for calls um and typically then what will happen is you know the between the
two servers you have to have like a trunk and you can use the very ashric servers you can use the
ix protocol for which is a very efficient protocol actually for um for communications between
between web service so yeah so you can use that and I think there's a real effort to make it a
standard as well so that it'll become like a telephony standard and it does do a lot of the stuff
that the SIP does as well in terms of setting up calls and initiating them and those kind of things
so yeah so uh first thing we haven't done I haven't worked a lot with the ix protocol
um myself you know because typically most of the work we do tend to be connecting
offices to the psdn network and then obviously the ones we'll just use the psdn
configurations later to talk to the psdn network that's the first is to reiterate the thing about
free feedbacks it's a great tool to do the configuration but um you know if you have
you can customize their code afterwards you'll be waiting for your source code for a long time
but um forget well when you set up your your channels um typically you assign numbers to the to
the channel so you can for example if you have um you know like you have an international
cool-on or something we have another one which you know which connects to the it's a typical
happens in some kind in some places yeah it's a replica you will have you have got to call
PEMI cells which are using for connecting to your self-on network so you can do least cross rooting
across um yeah depending what cool number you call it if you're calling a self-on it will
be rooted across the self-on network and not across the the landline network um and so then
each of those trunks is channels have a different number so you can root the the call across
that channel um so yeah I said but typically what in most cases it would just do is um you just
like if you've got a PRR line it's just to send all to one group and then you just you know
whatever channels available issues automatically select and send it across across that channel
um in the trunks yeah right so do we want to talk anything about I guess this can fit into
troubleshooting do you want to talk anything about the voice quality uh you know the quality
the network that might be underneath anything about latency that can be caused by packets
I know that here in our office that when people first come in uh new hires that aren't quite
familiar with our network we find that there's a bit of latency especially when we call into
mobile phones there's uh well it's negotiating at first that there's quite a delay and you think
that the dial that the call didn't work and you wait and uh I think you and I had talked about
how you can actually program where the the ringtone kicks in sooner so people will be
somewhat tricked or they think that they may be already connecting uh just to make up for
for the latency and as well I really I think we should talk or stress to people listening that
the quality of your network underneath all of this also can affect can affect so you think
it's the asterisk box that's causing you the problems it could be bad cabling in the office you
know it could be switches it could be a number of things and uh you know so sometimes you have to
trace it back a little bit further than just the asterisk installation now the question that's
an important point because you know especially if you if you on your local network it was a busy
network and it's already at capacity and you're going to put a web traffic on there you're going
to have problems um and also the size of local network often where a lot of problems come in
is that people think you know that they can just do weight routing over the over the internet with
their work provider over 80s online and the biggest one we have with 80s online is that it's
downloads you might be great but it's up rate speed is normally a fraction of what was
download speed um and that's the biggest bottleneck so typically you answer if you get these 4
meek um 80s online then your dance speed is I think 512k um and on that you can probably only have
two simultaneous calls um you know through that through that um internet connection and that's
only if you've got nothing else happening on the internet like people downloading stuff and that
so you know you do need quite a decent that you're going to do a lot of like let's say you've got
a 30 course um set course center you know you're going to be a big part of the internet to be able
to handle all of those calls if you're going to have a web provider keeny um and that's also one
so if you go there's not a lot of um you know you don't use work that much because bandwidth
yeah is very expensive um yeah hopefully the process will come down in the next year
if all these cables being laid and stuff but yeah it's very expensive so people typically just
integrate with a psdn network or even in some cases in this course center they just get other
course simbanks and essentially they're just these big banks full with like you know 50 sim cards
and they just roots all the calls over over that because obviously most courses tend to call
cell phones before they're called on landlines so yeah so they do a lot of integration with
with the simbanks um and uh I also think what's important as well you know you're talking about sort
of you're planning on doing an astrophysics installation as to many different expectations around
around the course because you know the the web core quality sometimes can be a little bit less
than on your traditional network um and typically you don't have a strong management team that's
back in the installation process you know people just with any change they're always going to resist
it and always going to find something to complain about um so there was important that people sort
of you know as it's normal change management stuff you know you have to have a strong management
commitment up and managing to get into the system and basically people to use it because people
tend to try and find all kinds of problems with the system wouldn't actually you know my experience
actually is very robust um and hardly ever goes any any help at all to make you an art when
has to mean problems or water actually you're sitting on the client side so it's either as you say
the network as a problem or the zip phone hasn't been set up properly stuff like that or the ADS
out connection or the the breakout antenna does not this isn't adequately enough to actually
you know um service all of the course that they're making right and I think to a you don't
know if we plan or talked about planning I think having a good IT plan a good telephony plan
in place is good and then you can plan when you're doing the installation the initial installation
what what do you plan to do in the future to make sure you have you know the equipment that
you can expand with uh make sure that you do you know if you're especially if you hire someone
to come in at the beginning to do your installation for you you know to make sure that you talk about
am I going to have ring groups do I need an IBR I will ever use follow me you know do I need
time conditions you know those ring groups are only available from 95 you know these kind of
things uh extension to cell phones uh you know think it forward thinking about what your sales force
or your staff is going to require yeah so do you agree with that Mark yeah do you especially
that's quite important in the sense that often actually sitting up the extra to the box itself
or just installing the base on server isn't that time consuming but it's doing the actual
the dial plan and the configuring is important you know you can set all these things up and then
somebody also need a dial group for X and that could like miss up your whole plan you have to do
read your whole lot of words uh it's important to plan upfront uh you know what's going to be done
and and used and that's also what often people don't put into their budgets you know um when they're
planning these things I just think because because it might experience what happens to the most people
where they get involved with asterisk you know that they sit at home they get a asterisk
just like elastic they sort of on their machine they don't have to integrate with a psd network
which is where a lot of your problems are because from as you know the biggest issue often
getting the right drivers getting the right um configuration and asterisk to talk to the psd
in network um and if you don't have that's it up probably it's not going to work and um many of
these guys in the sort of testing or any test of work functionality and it's actually quite trivial
to set up um and so the assume that the rest of it's going to be just as trivial and and it's not um
so you need to sort of you know people need to know that it's a budget for that kind of stuff and
you budget for the time that's involved in troubleshooting those those issues um because if you just
look and if you look on the internet in the forums you'll just see that that is before with
horse majority of issues now is if that if the as she doesn't pick up your the card when you install it
right okay and did we touch anything on about having a hosted solution like where somebody
has a remote installation of of asterisk instead of a hardware solution on site have you heard
of people doing that at all in your in your market uh mark? No that's really uh I figured
we could once again the bandwidth costs but what I do know you can do this is also we ashes is
also be used a lot in ours and sort of telecommuting to work um not so much as an Africa um but
I've heard about it overseas where you know because what's nice about it as you say you extension
can actually be anywhere so you can have an extension if you've got a decent internet connection
connection on the other side of the world which will ring when somebody finds in so typically now
you have people working from home they're just set up the the zip line at home to connect to the
the server sitting at the office and when somebody you know this phone sells and they get transferred
actually ring on the on the home phone and so that's quite a handy feature actually now that
you mentioned that I'm actually starting to work at home more so that might be an attractive feature
for me to go get one of our spare phones and and set it up at home so that my extension because I
was actually considering having to send to my cell phone but here in North America our cell
charges it's kind of reversed you guys have expensive bandwidth for your internet but you have
pretty cheap mobile phones and in North America we have cheap bandwidth but our mobile our cell phones
are mobile phones are very expensive daytime minutes so that would be an advantage for me to
to have a to have that zip phone here at home and forward it so I think I'm going to explore that
option myself well one thing you know we also were looking at our office at one stage um but
anything across our mind is you want to make sure that that because that that PBX has to be
exposed to the internet so just make sure there's no PSDN trunks available on there because if you
get hacked next minute you'll have a phone ball with all the phone calls to Russia or China so it's
best to make sure that the PBX that's sitting on the in your DMZ if people will be connected he
doesn't have any PSDN connections to it and it's used to root between the you know one on your
green network I suppose the connects to the PSDN network and and the box that DMZ so I think
it's something you have to be careful of there all right so was there anything else that we wanted
to touch on today Mark that we wanted to we want to talk about challenges of any like a
integration with other systems or yeah there's I mean I think it's too that I'd love to talk about
one is they're just quickly on the ISD inside of of Astrix and in terms of the hardware they could
that's an ask me this has been with the most pain is experience because you've got BRR and PRR
ISDN and in the first Astrix there were two problems actually the Linux kernel was using ISDN
for Linux and it didn't support a whole a whole lot of ISDN code and so you had to patch that
at some stages to get it to access to the BRR code and at the same time the LabB within Astrix
could live PRR that handles connections to the PRR ISDN lands couldn't support BRR lands
if you had a BRR code you had a problem we had you patch you had a patch lived PRR to support it
and that was quite a manual process and also it would break you couldn't have a BRR code and
PRR code in the same box and it would confuse the situation even more is that what you can do to
solve the problem is just actually replace the kernel ISDN Java with what's called MISDN Java
so when you replace that in the kernel then your BRR code and PRR codes will work without having to
patch Astrix but what you would have to do is you have to use a different what they're called
module in Astrix a channel the handles the channels this up with channels with the ISDN lands
so you know if you look on the internet and people have these problems it's very confusing
what you're reading what solutions people are putting in place to try and deal with the problem
and also what version of Astrix you know later version of Astrix actually supported BRR
natively don't have to patch them anymore and so that can be a lot of a lot of
air for a lot of confusion for people they're new to Astrix I mean especially for small businesses
because simply small business will use a BRR code as a basic rate to ISDN code and you install that
and that's when you have like a lot of a lot of problems but hopefully now that's behind us
I think a lot of the distributions like especially elastic for example use MISDN
kernel modules by default and the mod the ISDN MISDN Java is within Astrix itself
so yeah so it's getting a lot better a lot of the pain is disappearing out of the system there
and all right and you said there was one other thing you wanted to touch on yeah the other
thing would be around you know what I'll find if you have to integrate with existing PBXs
you know there's two worlds like we coming from the RT world into the telephony world
and telephony world has its own you know acronyms and protocols and stuff which you know
isn't really it's a whole new field that you have to get into and what I find is only a bit of
animosity from the traditional telephony side of technicians and stuff towards Astrix and
open source stuff there's another one of the biggest challenges actually working with them
and getting them to cooperate with you you know we found that you know often they're trying
to integrate to their system up with these sim banks for example and somebody's not working
on blame Astrix for the problem and it turns out that yeah they've got a misconfigured on the
on the sim bank you know we see things like for example in the sim bank they might only have
four sim cards for one provider like let's say it's Africa to be MTN and then they have four
for another provider hodocom and they programmed the sim bank to do the least cost rating and this
is okay see an all MTN calls over the MTN sims and all hodocommer calls are the hodocom sims
and then the course interstores darling they don't render massive numbers let's say
and this will start darling 10 or 8 MTN numbers at the same time and so what happens is obviously
after the four MTN numbers are rebooted people start getting channel unavailable responses from
the from the the sim bank and people say oh well look you know Astrix is dropping these calls
and it's not the case is because the sim banks being misconfigured but often you have to actually
fart with the with a technician that supports the sim bank to kill them because this is the problem
so often find that's is a bit of a challenge as well um you know and and also obviously the
the providers like the Siemens and all these other guys they're quite you know that
after the X's like Astrix and other source ones are very disrupted to the business so they're
not they're not very keen on integrating with them it's protectionism protectionism right so
yeah they're just trying to guard their own interests so yeah i guess um yeah that's
what i mean you've heard like you know we've gone up against quotes we're somewhere like
these proprietary guys that quoted over 400,000 man for system and you know we think we over
charging it you know at 50,000 man for Astrix system so you know it really is a one of those
classic examples basically of how open standards and can disrupt the you know essentially
have a factory industry um yeah so that's why Astrix is you know really really is taking on
it's catching on a lot yeah it's a lot quite a lot and you know i think with these economic
challenging times that you know even here in North America where we're so fixated on the
tailcoast that it will it will become a viable option i know that i've been working with some
nonprofit organizations that uh you know this is a very attractive solution to them and i and
honestly um has an IT person i think the best you know you talked about how people resist change
and you need support for management and you know the management support is good if you do run
into problems but i think an ideal solution or an ideal installation is when they don't even realize
they've changed you know where everything's gone smoothly they started using the phones the next
morning like you came in over the weekend or something to do the install and next you know
their calls are coming through their extensions are working their voicemails are working there's
nothing it you know the way they don't have to change their routine you know i know that sometimes
you have to change how you get your voicemail but ideally you know i should be transparent i would think
transparent yeah transparent installation all right was there anything else you wanted to
share a mark i just think that you know wifers and is going mainstream now because we're going to
came out a few years ago and in South Africa everybody hates the telephone company because it's
used to be a government monopoly and then they're privatized and basically possibly mainstream stubbornly
hard um despite poor service so everybody was really keen to do anything they can to get away from
these guys so in wifers came out everybody was keen to jump on the bandwagon um and you know
i was a bit of the heart phase of of wif and i think a lot of people had some negative experiences
there particularly around things like core quality and in South Africa it's a dominant due
related to it i've been saying you had the bandwidth that you can get over it um but i think now it's
gone into the mainstream phase the technology settle down move band with this coming on board
and you see more and more people actually adopting asterisk now and you know in particular
in South Africa i think you know the world stuff hasn't been taken off that well but mainly on the
integration to the psd internet with so yeah so it looks like uh you know once again open source
software is making a making a difference in a proprietary world okay and you know in North
America we actually have embraced toy blinds and it is very transparent you would know most times
that you were on on point a lot of businesses and you know employ that and it's even making
its way into residential but yeah like you said though at the beginning people jumped on it
there were called quality issues there were you know uh issues about nine one one calling
not realizing you're sharing the network when you're used to a dedicated copper line and uh
i don't know if we touched on it earlier but like in our office we have a uh mixed environment we
have four copper lines coming in then it turns to VoIP inside our office and um we go from there
and when we go out we go out through VoIP yeah that's a common common configuration that you
don't want to change especially businesses have been around for a long time they don't want to lose
their numbers that have been published then it's meant all that money doing business calls and
get their heads and all advertising and then so you need to keep the copper lines for incoming calls
and then they route over the VoIP line because you know one of the advantages of VoIP is I don't
think we talked about is that you know really it can do least it does all the least cost routing for
you so the VoIP provider guys are fans the cheapest the personal infrastructure in place does the
cheapest routing you know so cell phones get routed over the cell phone networks etc the
land lines and the land lines and international calls get routed by the cheapest possible route um
so that's also why it's they're quite a big threat to to a telephone company as well because
now you know in fact in South Africa for a telephone company yeah try to go to court because
I claim that least cost routing was banned by law because they were the only guy who had a lot to
do it um you know so it's you know it really is a technology that that is disrupted to both the
telcos and to the providers of the hardware and the PBX's well it's a whole new world isn't it yeah
all right Mark well I really enjoyed co-hosting with you today and you provided some really valuable
insights I'm sure to earn listeners and I'm sure if they have any questions they can always
comment on our podcast and I don't think we touched on it in the beginning or introduction but
I just was going to just delight in or to provide a little more insight to I am so my name is
Darling Parker and and I live in Canada actually in Calgary Alberta and I work for a company that's
does Linux based development and so open source applications of course are very interesting to us
and we do try to use them as much as possible because you know we have to walk the walk and top the
talk right so we we try to integrate them as much as we can into into our office environment
and you know in future podcasts I'd like to talk about Moodle which is an open source solution
that I've been using for some online training so maybe we can talk about that in the future more
yeah that'll be great I mean hearing a lot more about Moodle recently as well I personally
haven't used it but yeah it'll be great to concern information and I'm sure our listeners
are found interesting as well and yeah thanks for joining me on the podcast and for the
valuable insights and information you should share with us and Darling and I hope to see you next time
all right okay thank you very much then Mark thanks darling
you
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