Chapter 15. Asterisk: The Future of Telephony

Table of Contents

The Problems with Traditional Telephony
Closed Thinking
Limited Standards Compliancy
Slow Release Cycles
Refusing to Let Go of the Past and Embrace the Future
Paradigm Shift
The Promise of Open Source Telephony
The Itch That Asterisk Scratches
Open Architecture
Standards Compliance
Lightning-Fast Response to New Technologies
Passionate Community
Some Things That Are Now Possible
Legacy PBX migration gateway
Low-barrier IVR
Conference rooms
Home automation
The Future of Asterisk
Speech Processing
Festival
Speech recognition
High-Fidelity Voice
Video
The challenge of video-conferencing
Why we love video-conferencing
Why video-conferencing may never totally replace voice
Wireless
Wi-Fi
Wi-MAX
Unified Messaging
Peering
E.164
ENUM
e164.org
DUNDi
Challenges
Too much change, too few standards
VoIP spam
Fear, uncertainty, and doubt
Bottleneck engineering
Regulatory wars
Quality of service
Complexity
Opportunities
Tailor-made private telecommunications networks
Low barrier to entry
Hosted solutions of similar complexity to corporate web sites
Proper integration of communications technologies

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

--Mahatma Gandhi

We have arrived at the final chapter of this book. We’ve covered a lot, but we hope that you now realize that we have barely begun to scratch the surface of this phenomenon called Asterisk. To wrap things up, we want to spend some time exploring what we might see from Asterisk and open source telephony in the near future.

While prognostication is always a thankless task, we are confident in asserting that open source communications engines such as Asterisk herald a shift in thinking that will transform the telecommunications industry. In this chapter, we will discuss some of our reasons for this belief.