:EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet: Asterisk PBX: Open Source VoIP Branches Out
EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet: Asterisk PBX: Open Source VoIP Branches Out Oct 3, 2005, 18 :15 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (9057 reads) (Other stories by Paul Rubens)
"Telephony is generally regarded as a mission critical business service, and any downtime can be costly in terms of lost productivity and lost business: Most companies want their phones to be a dial-tone service. And since the PBX is the heart of a corporate telephone system, you'd imagine it would not be something that the company would want to scrimp and save on. No one ever got fired, in other words, for buying a Cisco PBX.
"Which is why the Asterisk open source PBX is quite surprising. Running on Linux on standard PC hardware with suitable PCI interface cards, it works as a PBX with extra telephony features like voice mail and conferencing, working with analog phones and standards-based IP phones for VoIP telephony. And it's certainly no geek plaything. You could run your own home PBX using Asterisk, certainly, but a single machine can handle raw call volumes in the low thousands, or about 120 channels with echo cancellation and transcoding. And by using built-in peering technology you can link up multiple Linux boxes to make a PBX serving a hundred thousand users..."
