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Asterisk Business Edition The certified build of the open source PBX is available now at a price that's designed to unnerve the closed-source competition.
Digium is to Asterisk, the open source PBX what Sendmail.com is to Sendmail, the open source MTA. Mark Spencer wrote Asterisk and remains its lead author (the project now has about 350 contributors, he says). Spencer is also the president of Digium, which produces commercial versions of Asterisk (for more on Digium and Mark Spencer, see The Power of Open Source Telephony). The product sells for $995, and comes with all the features. It also comes with a guarantee that the system works, if used with Digium hardware and specified servers (Dell and HP) running Linux (Red Hat). Don't rip and replace Of course, newer VoIP phones offer more services, but the Asterisk PBX can handle conference calling, voice mail, and the other basic features that every user expects from a PBX. Look at Digium's T-1 phones He says that any residential ISP has spare PRI capacity during the day, and can turn that into a phone service. "Phone numbers cost about $3 per month for a block of twenty. You hook your modem bank up to these phone numbers and put a device like an Asterisk server or an ADTRAN ATLAS. That device looks at a dialed number, and if it's the regular dialup number, it passes it through to the modem bank, but if, on the other hand, the call is for an office, it sends the call across an IP or TDM link, based on the number called. The net result is that business customers use the PRIs during the day, and residential customers use them at night." Features of the business edition Other features include:
The product is tested to run over 240 simultaneous calls per server, more than enough for most small- and medium-sized businesses. Pricing and availability
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