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wow....that's really cheap. Considering Asterisk's market share for VOIP ports.
by naushit 8y ago
wow....that's really cheap. Considering Asterisk's market share for VOIP ports.
- Rjevski 8y agoOn the other hand, I'm not sure Asterisk has a future. It's quite a legacy application and is not easily scalable nor made highly available. The world is also moving to hosted communications (Twilio, etc) so there is less and less need for a local PBX, thus less demand for Asterisk.
- florent42 8y ago> The world is also moving to hosted communications (Twilio, etc) so there is less and less need for a local PBX, thus less demand for Asterisk. Correct, but don't forget many hosted communications services use asterisk internally. Twilio did use Asterisk in the past, although I believe they have switched to something else.
- Rjevski 8y agoI believe they built their own, exactly for the reasons I outlined above.
- kimi 8y agoYou can scale Asterisk up quite a bit (we have customers with clusters of 50+ boxes) and every telecom uses it some way or the other.
- Rjevski 8y agoHow do you share state between them?
- kimi 8y agoLots of ways. Usually externally, through a database. An Asterisk box processes and forwards calls - you can hook into a "master controller" that decides what is to be done.
- spditner 8y agoThe state you tend to store is in the application side, so it still backs onto things like SQL databases in the end. You'd put another service in front of your Asterisk instances like OpenSIPS or Kamailio to distribute load.
- Rjevski 8y agoSeems like a huge hack. What we really need is some kind of etcd for telecoms, where you just configure it and they replicate and share state automatically.
- dvtrn 8y agoSIP? This sounds like exactly what SIP does. Or at least a function of what it exposes
- florent42 8y agoIt's not a hack. Think of Asterisk as if it was an http server + backend code. How do you scale? You scale horizontally using proxies (kamailio dispatchers), (what you would call "reverse proxies in the http world), and use external storage / database / logic.
- gerdesj 8y agoAsterisk is just another daemon. You could use etcd for it or Puppet or whatever to create config on the fly. On FreePBX you generally use MySQL/MariaDB.
- kimi 8y agoBut they were bleeding money, and just sold $30M total last year. Lots of people use Asterisk (it's basically everywhere - whatever you call - dentist, doctor, plumber... - they have the default Asterisk music-on-hold), but not all of them put a coin in the box. :)
- Rjevski 8y agoThey're everywhere because they're already there, but doesn't mean new boxes are being installed. Personally I wouldn't use it; I'd just write some quick code with Twilio (using Twilio functions or a companion app running on Heroku for the business logic) and let them handle it. Less maintenance overhead.
- naushit 8y agoThis is old battle.... Centrex VS PBX . ( if you are old enough to remember Centrex). Twillio is next-gen Centrex.
- Rjevski 8y agoI'm not really old enough to have experienced Centrex, but for small businesses its promises makes sense from a business point of view. Less maintenance/support overhead is a huge plus.
- yusyusyus 8y agosounds good. until you run conferencing services or whatever. Then the pricing is pretty simple: buying wholesale SIP and operating on your own is substantially cheaper. irl maintenance is pretty straightforward. I do it as a side thing to my main job.
- woodson 8y agoSomewhat off-topic, but what wholesale SIP provider would you recommend? Looking for something small-scale for now, pay as you go as opposed to $X,000/month.
- xroche 8y agoAnd they also have a very decent line or hardware. Digium cards used to be the de-facto standard to build quickly a small PBX system, and I really appreciated their quality.