http://www.networkworld.com/news/2006/091206-von-sam-houston.html

This is pretty big news.

Primer: VoIP stands for Voice over IP and is the transmission of voice, or phone calls (and faxes, voicemail, announcements, call trees, etc) over a network. It requires a particularly anal network because it packetizes the voice and voice is pretty sensitive to delays. Generally speaking, when voice packets are sent from one phone to the gateway (something voip phones talk to), it only has a max tolerance of about an 8th of a second. Even more important is the preservation of this anality when large problems happen on the network.

Asterisk is ‘free’ or open source VoIP (Voice Over IP). You could use Asterisk instead of a large voip vendor like Avaya, Cisco, etc. News like this is good for consumers because the big vendors have to reduce price and increase features in order to compete, and this news in particular is one of the biggest open source adoptions.

It’s analogous to a large company abandoning Windows and Microsoft Office on their PC’s and using Linux and OpenOffice or StarOffice. It’s big.

We use Avaya (400+ users) but we have a call center. We thought about open source when we made our choice last year but the call center part was so important we couldn’t go open source… There just isn’t anything suitable for intelligent call routing, data dip, etc.

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On an unrelated note, the author’s name sure is similar to the star poker player Phill Hellmuth.