Asterisk an Open Source PBX Server

Asterisk is an open source telephony engine and toolkit; it can be considered as a complete, software PBX (private branch exchange). This open source platform for telephony applications is a comprehensive call-processing server in and of itself. Asterisk is the world’s leading open source telephony engine and tool kit. Asterisk can be configured as the core of an IP or hybrid PBX, switching calls, managing routes, enabling features, and connecting callers with the outside world over IP, analog (POTS), and digital (T1/E1) connections. Asterisk is an incredibly powerful and flexible open source PBX server, it allows you to set up a sophisticated telephony system on your Mac (or PC) with multi-line extensions, voice mail, conferencing, call forwarding, and tons more.

Asterisk is, at it’s heart, a PBX system. However, it includes a whole host of telephony features such as voicemail and call conferencing. Asterisk is also becoming popular with home office users — so much so that it spawned a new project called Asterisk@Home , which released its 1.0 version last year. Now there’s even a version of Asterisk that runs on OpenWrt, a Linux distribution designed to run on your wireless router. Asterisk is a stateful proxy and is fully aware of the state of the call and owns also server features that depends of the call state like IVR (Interactive Voice Response) services that must work with the RTP messages. Therefore, Asterisk is most certainly not a stateless proxy server. Asterisk works with almost all standards-based telephone hardware and supports the TDM protocols used in traditional business telephone systems.

Skype’s rich presence will be integrated into Asterisk, but it isn’t currently part of the beta, but should be part of the final release. What that would allow is a remote agent to set their presence to Away or Available and then take inbound calls to the Asterisk queue based on their presence. Skype calls can be made, received, transferred, routed to voice mail or automated menus, and conference without the need for any additional hardware. Skype will also be an option for Asterisk’s least-cost call routing, so outgoing calls can be routed via Skype where it is cheapest. Where calls are made from one Skype client to another, the gateway will automatically use Skype’s HD audio mode allowing for clearer calls.

Open Source has started of as a movement to provide free software, but has matured to fulfill many of the usage cases that proprietary used to, but at a much lower cost. Open source solutions allow organizations choice and cost reductions. So if the organization is committed to customizing their organization around their customers or processes then open source solutions can make a major impact both on the bottom line and in customer interactions.