Asterisk is an open-source PBX that has VoIP capabilities. However, this hardly explains what Asterisk is
or what it does. So let’s delve a little more deeply into PBXes,VoIP, and Asterisk.
Asterisk, first and foremost, is a Private Branch Exchange.A PBX is a piece of equipment that handles
telephone switching owned by a private business, rather than a telephone company. Initially in the United
States, PBXes were for medium-to-large businesses that would create a lot of telephone traffic starting from,
and terminating within, the same location. Rather than having that traffic tie up the switch that handles
telephones for the rest of the area, PBXes were designed to be small switches to handle this traffic.
The PBX would keep the internal traffic internal, and also handle telephone calls to and from the rest of the
telephone network.
PBXes are one of the key pieces of hardware in businesses today, ranging from small devices the size of
shoeboxes that handle a few lines to the telephone network and five phones in a small office, to a large
system that interconnects ten offices across a campus of buildings.
Asterisk is a complete PBX. It implements all the major features of most commercially available PBXes.
Voice over Internet Protocol is one of the new buzzwords of the media today. While VoIP has been around
in one incarnation or another since the 1970s, the market and technology has exploded over the past three
years. Companies have sprouted up selling VoIP services and VoIP software, and instant messaging services
are starting to include VoIP features.
But what exactly is VoIP? VoIP is a method to carry a two-way conversation over an Internet Protocol–
based network.The person using Vonage to talk to her neighbor down the street? That’s VoIP.The person in
the United States using Windows Messenger to talk to his extended family in Portugal? That’s VoIP.
The 13-year-old playing Splinter Cell on his Xbox and talking to his teammates about how they slaughtered the other team? That’s VoIP, too.
A normal call that uses the standard telephone network compression coder–decoder algorithm (codec), μ-
Law, will take up 64 kilobits per second of bandwidth. However, with efficient compression schemes, that
can be dropped dramatically
or what it does. So let’s delve a little more deeply into PBXes,VoIP, and Asterisk.
Asterisk, first and foremost, is a Private Branch Exchange.A PBX is a piece of equipment that handles
telephone switching owned by a private business, rather than a telephone company. Initially in the United
States, PBXes were for medium-to-large businesses that would create a lot of telephone traffic starting from,
and terminating within, the same location. Rather than having that traffic tie up the switch that handles
telephones for the rest of the area, PBXes were designed to be small switches to handle this traffic.
The PBX would keep the internal traffic internal, and also handle telephone calls to and from the rest of the
telephone network.
PBXes are one of the key pieces of hardware in businesses today, ranging from small devices the size of
shoeboxes that handle a few lines to the telephone network and five phones in a small office, to a large
system that interconnects ten offices across a campus of buildings.
Asterisk is a complete PBX. It implements all the major features of most commercially available PBXes.
Voice over Internet Protocol is one of the new buzzwords of the media today. While VoIP has been around
in one incarnation or another since the 1970s, the market and technology has exploded over the past three
years. Companies have sprouted up selling VoIP services and VoIP software, and instant messaging services
are starting to include VoIP features.
But what exactly is VoIP? VoIP is a method to carry a two-way conversation over an Internet Protocol–
based network.The person using Vonage to talk to her neighbor down the street? That’s VoIP.The person in
the United States using Windows Messenger to talk to his extended family in Portugal? That’s VoIP.
The 13-year-old playing Splinter Cell on his Xbox and talking to his teammates about how they slaughtered the other team? That’s VoIP, too.
A normal call that uses the standard telephone network compression coder–decoder algorithm (codec), μ-
Law, will take up 64 kilobits per second of bandwidth. However, with efficient compression schemes, that
can be dropped dramatically
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