Asterisk for Not Yet Techies

I can remember the days when AT&T (often affectionately or derisively called "Ma Bell") WAS the American telephony industry. And it was the model for other national telephone companies (often government-owned) in just about every other country around the world.

Although it was split up in 1984 and the industry has gone through many changes and technological developments and now we have cell phones etc -- in many ways the industry is still far behind the times.

Closed networks, proprietary hardware and software -- reminds us of the IBM era of computing.

Asterisk changes all that. In 1999, a devotee of Linux and other open source software named Mark Spencer decided that he could put together a telephone system for his Linux technical support company much more cheaply than he could buy one from the commercial vendors.

So he created the first version of Asterisk, to run primarily on Linux but supports every important network protocol in the telephony world. Asterisk can communicate with every device from rotary, analog phones to Bluetooth and VoIP.

He named his program Asterisk because there's one on telephone keypads and because it's the Linux wild card symbol.

Eventually he decided he could make more money for focusing on Asterisk than on providing technical support to Linux users, and changed the name of his company to Digium, to support the spread of Asterisk.

Asterisk is dedicated to standards compliance -- unlike traditional telephone networks that won't communicate with each other.

Service Initiation Protocol / SIP

Inter-Asterisk eXchange Protocol / IAX

DUNDi -- creates dynamic, redundant distributed VoIP networks

Tandem switching

Asterisk Gateway Interface / AGI

These features and more are built in to the program:

Voice mail

Hosted conferencing

Call waiting

Call parking

Music on Hold

Stable -- the established, bug-free program

Head -- the experimental

Obviously, unless you're a developer who wants to work on the continuous creation of Asterisk, you'll want to use only stable.

1. main -- asterisk

2. Zapata telephone driver -- zaptel

3. PRI Libraries -- libpri

The Zapata Telephony Project by Jim Dixon was started separately from Asterisk, but they work well together. Dixon created an interface network card to enable a computer's CPU to interface with a telephone network. He named the card, "tormenta" (which means big storm in Spanish) and the entire project "Zapata" to emphasize its revolutionary nature.

The tormenta enables Asterisk's Publish Switched Telephone Network / PSTN engine.

So if you're in the market for a telephone system for your business, you should check out Asterisk. The software itself is free -- the main expense will be the setup, especially paying an expert to configure the program to your needs.

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