A Telecommunications Revolution

A revolution is taking place in the area of telecommunications and the revolution is being fueled by an open source Private Branch eXchange (PBX) system called ASTERISK.

All sorts of telecommunications manufacturers build ridiculously expensive, incompatible systems, running complex, often ancient code on obsolete hardware.  These traditional telephone systems combine proprietary hardware and proprietary software.  The resulting products have been either low cost and low function OR functional but expensive to purchase, maintain, make changes or upgrade.  Developers of these products have no interest in giving customers the ability to enhance or maintain them.  Why should they?  The proprietary model gives the traditional telephone supplier the ability to charge customers to use their products, charge to fix them, and charge again when they need enhancement.  This proprietary model gets even better for the telephone supplier, and worse for the customer as customers become tied to the vendor’s specific methods and capabilities.  The cost of switching away from the supplier becomes enormous, creating significant barriers to change.

Uniquely Suited for Business

Never in the history of telecommunications has a system so suited to the needs of business been available, at any price.  Asterisk is an enabling technology, and, as with Linux, it will become increasingly rare to find an enterprise that is not running some version of Asterisk   The flexibility it delivers creates possibilities that the best proprietary systems can only dream of.  This is because Asterisk is the ultimate PBX. 

Asterisk is not a simple system to configure.  This is not because it’s illogical, confusing or cryptic. To the contrary, it is very sensible and practical.  When there are literally thousands of ways to achieve a result, the process naturally requires extra effort, forethought and knowledge. Perhaps it can best be compared to building a house: The components are relatively easy to understand, but a person contemplating such a task must either a) enlist competent help or b) develop the required skills on their own.

This is where we can help!