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Asterisk doesn't suck! I setup a pbx for our own small biz many years ago - I think it was asterisk@home edition or something way back then. I upgraded a coup

Asterisk doesn't suck! I setup a pbx for our own small biz many years ago - I think it was asterisk@home edition or something way back then. I upgraded a couple years into it and that thing ran, without a problem, for the duration of our business - 6 years. The only time that box went down was when we had power outages. The business was phone intensive, handling hundreds of inbound and outbound calls a day. I love asterisk. Sure, the config files aren't the best to work with, but it wasn't that hard. I put it up on an old P4 machine and just let it run. Amazing really. The FreePBX app (that I upgraded to) made it really easy to do everything a PBX should - and this was YEARS ago. I then worked with asterisk again a few years ago when doing some consulting for a call center. This time, the front end was vicidial. Again, asterisk was rock solid. Not to be defensive - but it just doesn't suck. It was way ahead of its time in my opinion. It WORKED! I am reasonably confident it is the underlying infrastructure that twilio uses too.

runT1ME 16y ago
Ok, to be honest, Asterisk doesn't suck. It's used by thousands of companies and not all of them are miserable with it. However, hundreds of inbound calls a day is not what I call intensive. Hundreds a minute and suddenly Asterisk begs for mercy. It doesn't thread to multiple CPUs. Hell, the architecture was so awful one of the main programmers quit and wrote FREESwitch. Honestly, it probably performs worse on computers these days as GHZ has been going down to make room for multiple cores. For a small business with plenty of time, not too many calls, and not a ton of money, it's not a terrible solution.
- codeslush 16y ago
  For a small business, 100's of calls a day is above average. But, to your point, the call center I implemented it at had a configuration that did many thousands of calls a day going OUT of it. Perhaps inbound would be a problem (I honestly don't know), but we had 4 pri's hooked up to it and tapped them out 8 hours a day. For anyone who doesn't know the terminology, this is over 90 simultaneous calls. This involved much more than just placing calls - all the queues, auto dials and answering machine detection was going on at the same time. The server was a proper server - but I believe less than 2k (this was 2 years ago). I should note that Vicidial did have some mods to the core asterisk code to account for some issues - but these are things the average small business isn't going to encounter. Anyway, I'm not trying to downplay the real announcement here - I think it's a very valuable type of service and definitely something a fair number of businesses need. I just had to defend Asterisk! :-)
- thesis 16y ago
  While I agree "100's" of calls is not intensive at all, asterisk has it's place just like every thing else. It's all about how you set it up. Our asterisk servers rarely crash, and handle more then a 100 or 200 calls per minute with ease.

runT1ME 16y ago

Ok, to be honest, Asterisk doesn't suck. It's used by thousands of companies and not all of them are miserable with it. However, hundreds of inbound calls a day is not what I call intensive. Hundreds a minute and suddenly Asterisk begs for mercy. It doesn't thread to multiple CPUs. Hell, the architecture was so awful one of the main programmers quit and wrote FREESwitch. Honestly, it probably performs worse on computers these days as GHZ has been going down to make room for multiple cores. For a small business with plenty of time, not too many calls, and not a ton of money, it's not a terrible solution.

codeslush 16y ago
For a small business, 100's of calls a day is above average. But, to your point, the call center I implemented it at had a configuration that did many thousands of calls a day going OUT of it. Perhaps inbound would be a problem (I honestly don't know), but we had 4 pri's hooked up to it and tapped them out 8 hours a day. For anyone who doesn't know the terminology, this is over 90 simultaneous calls. This involved much more than just placing calls - all the queues, auto dials and answering machine detection was going on at the same time. The server was a proper server - but I believe less than 2k (this was 2 years ago). I should note that Vicidial did have some mods to the core asterisk code to account for some issues - but these are things the average small business isn't going to encounter. Anyway, I'm not trying to downplay the real announcement here - I think it's a very valuable type of service and definitely something a fair number of businesses need. I just had to defend Asterisk! :-)
thesis 16y ago
While I agree "100's" of calls is not intensive at all, asterisk has it's place just like every thing else. It's all about how you set it up. Our asterisk servers rarely crash, and handle more then a 100 or 200 calls per minute with ease.