Asterisk (phone system)

[ddrueding]

Our phone system at the office is going south slowly. Even though it is only 5 years old, the product has been discontinued for 2 years already, and parts are getting hard (and expensive) to find. Management is understandably annoyed that we need to replace the entire thing, including all the handsets (proprietary) so soon.

I've told them that I'll put together a rig that will not cost $50k like the last one.

Time to learn Asterisk.

Anyone using it? Good experiences? Bad? Thoughts?

The first thing I'm looking for is an RJ21-X rackmount breakout box.

Thanks!

 

[ddrueding]

Looks like I found all the parts I'll need on Digium's website. About $2k for the custom server hardware. Probably another $1k for the normal server bits. Now I get to start auditioning handsets. Anyone have a preference here?

 

[Howell]

SNOM handsets are pretty good and cheap.

Frankly, I'd avoid asterisk and rather go with a Cisco or Cudatel.

 

[ddrueding]

Frankly, I'd avoid asterisk and rather go with a Cisco or Cudatel.

Any bad experiences with asterisk? This advice reminds me of Lunar's that I should skip the 7D and get a 1DIV; the price difference is considerable.

 

[Mercutio]

I tried to offer Asterisk back in 2005 and 2006. I never got any traction for it with my customers and eventually I dropped the idea; most of my customers think of their phone system as beyond vital to doing business and even if they aren't happy with what they have, it's also not anything they want to change or play with.

 

[Mercutio]

I was working from the ORA Asterisk book and some hardware "recipes" I found on an Asterisk wiki site, for what it's worth.

 

[ddrueding]

Beyond crucial is one word for it. But our current system is less reliable than any of the servers I've built.

 

[Gilbo]

I'm considering moving my office over to Asterisk when we move locations later this year, so I may be going through the same thing.

I'm definitely very interested in how things go.

 

[Howell]

Any bad experiences with asterisk? This advice reminds me of Lunar's that I should skip the 7D and get a 1DIV; the price difference is considerable.

You are exaggerating, the price difference is not that much for a business. Its about $2k.

The Cudatel is based on the core switching functionality of Asterisk. They even hired the 3 guys who developed it. I remember an article which referenced an asterisk problem with high load but I don't have personal experience with it. I don't remember what the definition of high load was.

The good news is if it doesn't work the only thing the company wasted is your time. Good luck and let us know how it turns out.

 

[blakerwry]

You can usually find used Aastra's on ebay. They're pretty much bullet proof and work well with headsets - we stick with Plantronics headsets.

We've looked at Asterisk before, but it didn't provide the monitoring/reporting capabilities we needed. Plus, it looked like we'd have to write a pretty hefty front end for managing it. Both of these aspects have probably improved since I last checked though.

 

[sechs]

Based on talking to others, I'd suggest going with Cisco, as well. Their system is fully baked, and the company is here for the long term.

Frankly, this doesn't sound like something you want to homebrew.

 

[Sol]

How many people are you talking about here and what kind of capabilities do you need? (Internal transfer, external transfer, voice mail, least cost routing, conferencing?)

Have you considered getting an external provider and just connecting your handsets to them via a proxy like OpenSBC or something? (I'm not sure who provides this kind of service in the US but I'll ask at work on Monday and someone will)
Providers will start to become more common over the next couple of years so as long as you get good, widely compatible handsets you shouldn't have any trouble moving providers later if you need to.

Have you considered getting an external VOIP trunking provider and connecting through a server like FreeSWITCH without any telephony specific hardware requirements (other than the phones)? It really depends on what you need to do as to whether this is a viable option but it's probably not much different from using Asterisk with lower hardware costs.
A JSR289 application server and applications are another possibility here (Mobicents do an open source one but I've never used it) but if you need something that complex then you're probably better off buying something pre-packaged or going to an external provider.

I work kind of on the other end of this, writing the software that these sort of systems run on, so I know a lot about how they work but nothing about what they cost...