[lug] What would you like to know about Asterisk?

[Dan Ferris]

Show people Trixbox.  We have a sysadmin who deployed Asterisk at our 
backup/DR site in Dallas as a backup PBX.  He just used Trixbox.  I use 
it all the time with the Zoiper softphone and it works great.

Dan

Nate Duehr wrote:
> Sean Reifschneider wrote:
>  > Next month I'm going to be talking at BLUG about Asterisk.  In order
>  > to tune the talk to the audience, I'd like to hear what kinds of
>  > things list members would like to hear about.
> 
> Quite a challenging topic, Sean.  Asterisk is the 800 lb gorilla in the 
> open-source telco world.  Lots of products based off of it, etc.  Very 
> cool stuff, but hard to do a short talk on!
> 
> I work on stuff like Asterisk for a living, so I could ask evil 
> questions that are so far above everyone's head that's just learning it, 
> that I won't bother!  (GRIN)
> 
> Looking over your slides, I would point out that Asterisk has been 
> around long enough, nowadays it's becoming used for more than just "PBX" 
> services.  An example would be 2-way radio linking...
> 
> http://app-rpt.qrvc.com/
> 
> It's almost to the point where a talk on Asterisk is more of a "What 
> WON'T it do?" in the telco/VoIP world now, instead of a "What are all 
> its features".  Like Apache for web services, the Asterisk core has 
> become the VoIP telephony swiss army knife.
> 
> That said:  There are applications it does NOT do well.  For example, it 
> does conference bridging, but not to professional quality standards. The 
> latency it introduces into the audio stream doesn't meet any carrier's 
> specifications for quality.  (Most carriers want audio energy 
> transported back to the receiving handset in something around 100mS or 
> less, if they can get it... and all receivers must receive within less 
> than 20mS of each other.)
> 
> People's voices come out of different phones at different "times", and 
> even though for MOST applications that's not a big problem... say on a 
> big trading floor with 25 phones in the conference, listening to the 
> room "echo" like that whenever someone speaks, is REALLY annoying.
> 
> Adding CPU to it ALWAYS helps when you're doing highly CPU-intensive 
> stuff but it simply can't do with a generic CPU, what a custom ASIC or 
> DSP chipped hardware platform can do.  Muti-core might help (I've never 
> looked at their conferencing code), but not sure if that code is threaded.
> 
> For your presentation -- you might want to look at the "easy" ways to 
> get started... some of the LiveCD distros that have it pre-loaded and 
> ready to go, complete with web interfaces, etc...  if you have the right 
> hardware or ATA's, etc.  That's a great way to help someone get started 
> with it.
> 
> Sadly, I still haven't built one of these for home.  Staring at SIP 
> traces at work all day long in Wireshark will "cure" anyone who wants to 
> "play with phone systems" for a living.  LOL!
> 
> Nate
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