Asterisk, the open source PBX, turns 17 this year. Asterisk kicked off a revolution in the telecommunications industry, bringing a level playing field to the then-emerging concept of IP Telephony, and a few years later doing the same for legacy telecom technologies such as Analog and PRI. Asterisk served notice to the old guard that […]
THE INTERNET A critical piece of the VoIP puzzle is your connection to the outside world. Before VoIP, the phone company controlled how your telecom services got to your site. They owned what is commonly termed The Last Mile—all the infrastructure right to your door. If you wanted to connect to the Public Switched Telephone […]
THE INTERNAL NETWORK You probably have an internal network, but if it’s going to be used for voice, a few requirements need to be considered. Voice actually doesn’t require a lot of network bandwidth (we’ve successfully implemented VoIP phones on CAT3 cabling). A telephone call uses less than 100kbps of bandwidth, therefore a typical network […]
When evaluating the network for your IP Telephony deployment, you need to be aware of some of the differences between a hosted PBX and an onsite-PBX. In order to simplify this, we will break the network down into two separate concepts: The Local, onsite network (or LAN), and the wide-area, external network (or WAN, typically […]
At its simplest, IP Telephony is just a way to carry voice from one place to another. What makes it so revolutionary is not so much due to any technical advantages, but simply that it is based on inexpensive and popular networking standards. You can buy the hardware at your local computer store. The details […]
The technologies that run the internet were first developed in the 60s. The network could be built as a mesh of nodes, and information could be sent in more than one direction—routing. Also, connections between nodes could be shared with all the types of traffic passing through. This is analogous to the highway networks of […]
Humans love to talk. Any discussion of IP Telephony needs to always keep first and foremost the understanding that the primary purpose for telephones is to allow us to talk to each other. It seems obvious, but this simple fact sometimes gets lost in technical details. Our vocal cords, tongue, lips and teeth allow us […]
The best phone systems for small business operations are generally those systems which offer lots of configuration flexibility (i.e. lots of useful features to choose from), but can be delivered as a simple solution. Traditionally, phone systems for smaller businesses lacked the features available to larger businesses (which of course also had larger budgets). This […]
If one asks the question: What is a PBX System? One will typically get the answer: A Private Branch Exchange. What is more important of course is understanding what it does. The PBX emerged from a desire of businesses to reduce the cost of telephone services, coupled with a need for more control over how […]
In its early days, VoIP was touted for many reasons, but quality was seldom one of them. VoIP was traditionally seen as a riskier technology, with near-certain problems with quality and reliability. Land lines (especially digital circuits such as PRI) were so reliable that one could reasonably expect decades of trouble-free service from them. Carriers […]
