We all know what a telephone is—but will it be the same five years from now? Part of the revolution that Asterisk is contributing to is the evolution of the telephone, from a simple audio communications device into a multimedia communications terminal providing all kinds of yet-to-be-imagined functions.
As an introduction to this exciting concept, we will briefly discuss the various kinds of devices we currently call “telephones” (any of which can easily be integrated with Asterisk). We will also discuss some ideas about what these devices may evolve into in the future (devices that will also easily integrate with Asterisk).
Any physical device whose primary purpose is terminating an on-demand audio communications circuit between two points can be classified as a physical telephone. At a minimum, such a device has a handset and a dial pad; it may also have feature keys, a display screen, and various audio interfaces.
This section takes a brief look at the various user (or endpoint) devices you might want to connect to your Asterisk system. We delve more deeply into the mechanics of analog and digital telephony in Appendix A, Understanding Telephony.
Analog phones have been around since the invention of the telephone. Up until about 20 years ago, all telephones were analog. Although analog phones have some technical differences in different countries, they all operate on similar principles.
When a human being speaks, the vocal cords, tongue, teeth, and lips create a complex variety of sounds. The purpose of the telephone is to capture these sounds and convert them into a format suitable for transmission over wires. In an analog telephone, the transmitted signal is analogous to the sound waves produced by the person speaking. If you could see the sound waves passing from the mouth to the microphone, they would be proportional to the electrical signal you could measure on the wire.
Analog telephones are the only kind of phones that are commonly available in any retail electronics store. In the next few years, that can be expected to change dramatically.
As digital switching systems developed in the 1980s and 1990s, telecommunications companies developed digital private branch exchanges (PBXs) and key telephone systems (KTSs). The proprietary telephones developed for these systems were completely dependent on the systems to which they were connected and could not be used on any other systems. Even phones produced by the same manufacturer were not cross-compatible (for example, a Nortel Norstar set will not work on a Nortel Meridian 1 PBX). The proprietary nature of digital telephones limits their future. In this emerging era of standards-based communications, they will quickly be relegated to the dustbin of history.
The handset in a digital telephone is generally identical in function to the handset in an analog telephone, and they are often compatible with each other. Where the digital phone is different is that inside the telephone, the analog signal is sampled and converted into a digital signal—that is, a numerical representation of the analog waveform. We discuss digital signals in more detail in Appendix A, Understanding Telephony; for now, suffice it to say that the primary advantage of a digital signal is that it can be transmitted over limitless distances with no loss of signal quality.
The chances of anyone ever making a proprietary digital phone directly compatible with Asterisk are slim, but companies such as Citel (http://www.citel.com)[239] have created gateways that convert the proprietary signals to Session Initiation Protocol (SIP).[240]
Prior to VoIP, the closest thing to a standards-based digital telephone was an ISDN-BRI terminal. Developed in the early 1980s, ISDN was expected to revolutionize the telecommunications industry in exactly the same way that VoIP promises to finally achieve today.
There are two types of ISDN: Primary Rate Interface (PRI) and Basic Rate Interface (BRI). PRI is commonly used to provide trunking facilities between PBXs and the PSTN, and is widely deployed all over the world. BRI is not at all popular in North America, but is common in Europe.
While ISDN was widely deployed by the telephone companies, many consider the standard to have been a flop, as it generally failed to live up to its promises. The high costs of implementation, recurring charges, and lack of cooperation among the major industry players contributed to an environment that caused more problems than it solved.
BRI was intended to service terminal devices and smaller sites (a BRI loop provides two digital circuits). A wealth of BRI devices have been developed, but BRI has largely been deprecated in favor of faster, less expensive technologies such as ADSL, cable modems, and VoIP.
BRI is still very popular for use in videoconferencing equipment, as it provides a fixed-bandwidth link. Also, BRI does not have the type of quality of service issues a VoIP connection might, as it is circuit-switched.
BRI is still sometimes used in place of analog circuits to provide trunking to a PBX. Whether or not this is a good idea depends mostly on how your local phone company prices the service, and what features it is willing to provide.[241]
IP telephones are heralds of the most exciting change in the telecommunications industry. Already, standards-based IP telephones are available in retail stores. The wealth of possibilities inherent in these devices will cause an explosion of interesting applications, from video phones to high-fidelity broadcasting devices to wireless mobility solutions to purpose-built sets for particular industries to flexible all-in-one multimedia systems.
The revolution that IP telephones will spawn has nothing to do with a new type of wire to connect your phone to, and everything to do with giving you the power to communicate the way you want.
The early-model IP phones that have been available for several years now do not represent the future of these exciting appliances. They are merely a stepping-stone, a familiar package in which to wrap a fantastic new way of thinking.
A softphone is a software program that provides telephone functionality on a non-telephone device, such as a PC or PDA. So how do we recognize such a beast? What might at first glance seem a simple question actually raises many. A softphone should probably have some sort of dial pad, and it should provide an interface that reminds users of a telephone. But will this always be the case?
The term softphone can be expected to evolve rapidly, as our concept of what exactly a telephone is undergoes a revolutionary metamorphosis.[242] As an example of this evolution, consider the following: would we correctly define popular communication programs such as Instant Messenger as softphones? IM provides the ability to initiate and receive standards-based VoIP connections. Does this not qualify it as a softphone? Answering that question requires knowledge of the future that we do not yet possess. Suffice it to say that, while at this point in time softphones are expected to look and sound like traditional phones, that conception is likely to change in the very near future.
As standards evolve and we move away from the traditional telephone and toward a multimedia communications culture, the line between softphones and physical telephones will become blurred indeed. For example, we might purchase a communications terminal to serve as a telephone and install a softphone program onto it to provide the functions we desire.
Having thus muddied the waters, the best we can do at this point is to define what the term softphone will refer to in relation to this book, with the understanding that the meaning of the term can be expected to undergo a massive change over the next few years. For our purposes, we will define a softphone as any device that runs on a personal computer, presents the look and feel of a telephone, and provides as its primary function the ability to make and receive full-duplex audio communications (formerly known as “phone calls”)[243] through E.164 addressing.[244]
A telephony adaptor (usually referred to as an ATA, or Analog Terminal Adaptor) can loosely be described as an end-user device that converts communications circuits from one protocol to another. Most commonly, these devices are used to convert from some digital (IP or proprietary) signal to an analog connection that you can plug a standard telephone or fax machine into.
These adaptors could be described as gateways, for that is their function. However, popular usage of the term telephony gateway would probably best describe a multiport telephony adaptor, generally with more complicated routing functions.
Telephony adaptors will be with us for as long as there is a need to connect incompatible standards and old devices to new networks. Eventually, our reliance on these devices will disappear, as did our reliance on the modem—obsolescence through irrelevance.
Communications terminal is an old term that disappeared for a decade or two and is being reintroduced here, very possibly for no other reason than that it needs to be discussed so that it can eventually disappear again—once it becomes ubiquitous.
First, a little history. When digital PBX systems were first released, manufacturers of these machines realized that they could not refer to their endpoints as telephones—their proprietary nature prevented them from connecting to the PSTN. They were therefore called terminals, or stations. Users, of course, weren’t having any of it. It looked like a telephone and acted like a telephone, and therefore it was a telephone. You will still occasionally find PBX sets referred to as terminals, but for the most part they are called telephones.
The renewed relevance of the term communications terminal has nothing to do with anything proprietary—rather, it’s the opposite. As we develop more creative ways of communicating with each other, we gain access to many different devices that will allow us to connect. Consider the following scenarios:
If I use my PDA to connect to my voicemail and retrieve my voice messages (converted to text), does my PDA become a phone?
If I attach a video camera to my PC, connect to a company’s website, and request a live chat with a customer service rep, is my PC now a telephone?
If I use the IP phone in my kitchen to surf for recipes, is that a phone call?
The point is simply this: we’ll probably always be “phoning” each other, but will we always use “telephones” to do so?
[239] Citel has produced a fantastic product, but it is limited by the fact that it is too expensive. If you have old proprietary PBX telephones, and you want to use them with your Asterisk system, Citel’s technology can do the job, but make sure you understand how the per-port cost of these units stacks up against replacing the old sets with pure VoIP telephones.
[240] SIP is currently the most well-known and popular protocol for VoIP. We discuss it further in Appendix B, Protocols for VoIP.
[241] If you are in North America, give up on this idea, unless you have a lot of patience and money and are a bit of a masochist.
[242] Ever heard of Skype?
[243] OK, so you think you know what a phone call is? So did we. Let’s just wait a few years, shall we?
[244] E.164 is the ITU standard that defines how phone numbers are assigned. If you’ve used a telephone, you’ve used E.164 addressing.