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So long, and Thanks for all the Copper |
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Saturday, 02 August 2003 |
Last night I saw something that will make people leave phone companies like the dolphins left the earth before it was demolished in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - a software PBX. This particular one, asterix, is an open source solution that runs on linux and allows for just about any phone configuration you can imagine.
You can setup your own extensions, voice mailboxes, route incoming calls based on caller ID, and do just about anything else. And it all runs on just about any old computer. A friend of mine has two T1 blocks setup internally (48 lines) and runs it off of a 500Mhz machine. Another friend has one box in his office, and an IP phone at a client site in California. They can call each other all they want over the internet using regular phones without incurring long distance charges. That same friend also has a rule to route all calls to voicemail after 9pm.
This is the bare-metal way of doing what Vonage does. This will finally make voice over IP ubiquitous. I think the software pbx will do for voice over IP what sendmail did for email.
I'm going to set one of these up at home with a Digium Wildcard X100P and a couple of inexpensive IP phones. This card will take my incoming line from Bell Sloth (aka Bell South). There are some companies, like nufone, that provide the interface to the public phone network for you so you don't even need "real" phone line to make a call.
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