Practical Asterisk

We learned a few common sense lessons from a business-focused VoIP provider.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [March 4, 2008]

Jim Van Meggelen is the co-founder and CEO of Toronto,Ont.-based Coretel.ca (not to be confused with Annapolis, Md.-based wholesaler coretel). Van Meggelen's company has evolved from installing PBX systems to the latest in Asterisk for SMB customers.

The company still does on-premise solutions, however. "We're not against hosted solutions," he says. "But we've found it difficult to get control over the WAN. We don't consider on-premise technology superior; it's just a more straightforward solution for the time being."

Similarly, he is not an Asterisk monotheist. "We'll use either traditional telephony or VoIP. We'll mix and match them as needs dictate."

So you're not preaching the death of the phone company? "Let me be careful here. I want to frame my position. I don't feel a need to trash talk. I'm in the business of conversations. People want to have conversations and they expect it to work well. How it gets from point A to point B is irrelevant to most people."

Ironically, everything that's being touted now has been promised before. "In traditional telephony in the 1980s and 1990s, before VoIP, everything VoIP promises now was being promised then."

The most important promise is this: the user controls the phone system. "The challenge is to get control out of the industry and into the hands of the users. The traditional phone company cannot come up with the creativity that's required to take advantage of everything that's possible now.

Customers like it because the phone system is now just part of IT. "Put it on a standards-compliant server running on commodity hardware. The customer now has a PBX that's just one more part of the server farm, and it is maintained as part of that server farm."

All of the maintenance procedures already in place for servers now work for the phone system too. The customer will have a spare server ready if needed and can get the spare up and running themselves.

Of course, there are costs associated with power and flexibility. "If you take advantage of everything the platform can do for you, it could be more expensive [than a traditional PBX]."

How Coretel.ca does it
The company has a standardized base platform that can do everything that a customer wants it to do. The key is to keep it simple and deliver just the features that customers actually want.

Most customers want to do the simple things, but if you put more complex tools in the PBX GUI, customers will forget how to use them and call up Coretel when they need it done. "It's simple for us to do it because we do it every day," says Van Meggelen.

People remember the flawed PBX systems of just a few years ago. "Why did the telecom crash happen? My theory is that there was too much hype and too little delivered. Everyone had a solution that would do anything and everything. But when people bought the system, they found it was riddled with bugs. There was no interoperability—even between product lines of the same company! People had enough and stopped buying. Now, seven to ten years later, there's a massive number of people hanging onto old PBX systems who fear to change because they know the horror stories and expect it to be cost prohibitive."

When he comes in to a company, Van Meggelen says, he simply replaces the phone system without adding any of the special features that VoIP can deliver. Later on, the new system can deliver more if the customer feels ready for it. People aren't using Google mashups or the cutting edge sales-team-at-glance system that Tristan Degenhardt showed us at the last ISPCON.

Instead, Van Meggelen says, people want to increase capacity without buying more phone lines, or tie offices together. Some things that are simple in Asterisk might be tough in a PBX, such as follow me. "Asterisk rings my desk, then the phone in the lab, and then my cell phone. You can do it with a traditional PBX but its complex; it's simpler in Asterisk. You have more flexibility."

Asterisk has a bright future precisely because it's open source. If you consider only the technology, Van Meggelen says, ISDN might be better than what we have today, except that it's a closed system. "Now it's used only for PRI circuits."

Vertical markets
VoIP providers can specialize. Coretel.ca has built a business helping business center owners. These are offices that sublet small units to new businesses, and provide a receptionist who might answer the phone for several different customers. So when a phone call comes into the business center, the Coretel.ca system displays the answer script on screen ("Hello, this is Bob's Business. . .").

Business centers implement a large amount of phone number changes during a short period of time. They have many customers with different demands. All of this, too, is easier to do in software than hardware, easier to do in Asterisk than in a PBX, Van Meggelen says.

The cool stuff, the future
Although most SMB customers don't want the latest in VoIP, that hasn't stopped Van Meggelen learning about it in the lab. In fact, he's eager to talk about it.

Database integration, where every incoming phone call is cross referenced to the CRM database, has great potential. Van Meggelen says that the VoIP provider doesn't need to be a database expert. Instead, Coretel.ca can provide the integration hook for the phone system and rely on the customer to handle their own CRM database. "You develop the app and we provide the XML interface to your telecom system," says Van Meggelen. "Piece of cake."

In the future, it would be nice to never have to remember a phone number again. Already, phone systems are connecting multiple phone numbers to one—why not go a step farther and connect devices to names instead of numbers? Here, the phone company is an obstacle. "There's an opportunity that exists for the carrier where it drops a connection and guarantees the quality end to end but won't control what you use it for," says Van Meggelen. "But if they cannot figure out how to do it themselves, they won't let you do it."

The bottom line
In the end, he's selling simplicity. With an IP phone system, the phone system becomes part of IT. It threatens no jobs, and gives more control to the end user, not less. "We want to be the guys you go to to get the phone stuff working," he says. "Business will fight for control and be suspicious of anything that presumes to take control away."

He is also, of course, competing on price. "An integrator might ask $200,000. We'll go in and talk about what will work and what won't work." And the fee will start at $10,000, going upward for more complex integration.

"For us, it's maybe a week of work, or a few days, or a month of development work."

Because the development can be done off site, the installation can be fast. Much of the work can be done ahead of time. Sometimes, even the wiring can be done in advance. Retain the copper for the old PBX but switch the connectors from RJ-11 to RJ-45. You've got copper-based CAT 3, capable of 10 Mbps and 100 Mbps but not GigE. For a phone system, that's enough.

— End