VoIP

Asterisk is Developing

We talk to two participants in the VoIP open source project about achievements so far and goals for the future.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [June 17, 2005]

We've always heard that developers are underappreciated, so we think it only right to buy breakfast for two Asterisk developers at ISPCON. Learning about Asterisk and about two ISPs, one very small and one medium-sized, were ancillary benefits. Our goal is to learn about Asterisk, the open source phone system named after programming's wild card.

Huntsville, Ala.-based Digium, founded by Mark Spencer, is the company that has sent the developers to ISPCON (see this internetnews.com Q&A;). Digium is seen by some as doing for Asterisk what Red Hat and others have done for Linux, but the details are more complex as the Q&A; shows.

Meet the developers
Greg Boehnlein is vice president of Cleveland, Ohio-based N2Net, an ISP originally founded as New Age Consulting Services (NACS.net). "I've been in the ISP business for 10 years, and I think I've made just about every possible mistake," he says.

NACS.net was founded by Boehnlein and a childhood friend in 1995 with $5,000 in cash, later supplemented with venture capital and funding from the Small Business Administration (SBA).

The company made nine acquisitions during the 2000-2005 period, including 3 acquisitions last year, in 2004. "I've never worked so hard in my life," says Boehnlein.

One of those acquisitions was a company called N2Net which had a bigger name and was running radio TV ads. But N2Net had a weakness that wasn't management's fault. "They relied on Rhythms and Northpoint," explains Boehnlein. When the two DSL providers went bust, they took down many ISPs with them.

Brian Capouch is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science (and department chair) at St. Joseph's College in Rensselaer, Ind.

He runs a very small break-even WISP catering to a few dozen local friends. "All my wireless POPs have an Asterisk server. All POPs can make local calls to each other using IAX." (IAX is pronounced as "eeks".)

Both are lifelong VoIP hobbyists. Boehnlein says he was trained in voice technology to do PBX installs in 1992, though the technology was not up to the demands placed on it. "They were pitching convergence with Windows 3.1 and it was awful. It was clear it needed a few years. Then in 1999 Mark [Spencer] released Asterisk and I found it on Slashdot in 2001."

Capouch also discovered Asterisk on Slashdot, but in 2002. He is a lifelong VoIP programmer and hobbyist, remembering that his first calls were from the Carlton Arms hotel in New York City using H.323 and a CLI.

Today, Capouch has a wired nineteenth century home in which every appliance and several video cameras can be accessed remotely. He's concerned about raccoons, not people, and installed a mixer with a bad bearing to scare them away from his chimney. He uses X10 (yes, the popup people) to control the thermostat, the lights, the appliances, and the mixer to scare away the raccoons. "I can look down the chimney and turn on the mixer," he says.

Boehnlein helps organize Ohio Linux Fest in an open source collaborative manner and runs a large ISP. He relates a very nice story about Jon "maddog" Hall. Boehnlein says that when the fest obtained record attendance of 350, it switched to a larger venue and Marriott asked the organizers for $2,000 at the last minute. "maddog put it on his credit card and got most of it back during the show from donations."

Open source VoIP
Asterisk is riding on the VoIP wave, and people are seeing benefits. Boehnlein says, "our operations manager is from London and he was spending $400 per month calling his parents. Now, with VoIP, he pays zero. The owner of a chain of video rental stores was paying $0.50 per minute per caller for conference calls, and now pays nothing. Asterisk developers are completely off the PSTN. We can talk for 12 to 14 hours straight and it's free."

The Asterisk developers use IRC for presence management, to show who's on the call.

Picking winners
The developers feel Asterisk is the best option available and are quick to criticize the competition.

Boehnlein says Skype has flaws. "It's closed and proprietary. It probes for and advertises local assets. This is the KaZaA people saying, 'trust us!'"

The developers see Basking Ridge, N.J.-based Avaya as a fellow traveler in the VoIP revolution, but one not following the right path. After all, Avaya is a Lucent spinoff and the two companies still work together. "I would never run Windows and Lucent APs require Windows," says Capouch.

Even worse, Avaya does not encourage innovators the way open source projects do. "Avaya and Lucent are focused on the PBX, but they're not good on external applications. Asterisk is a toolkit, not just a PBX," says Boehnlein.

Of the VoIP protocols, the developers also have a quick answer to why theirs is best. "Spencer says that H.323 was developed by the telcos, people who didn't know the internet," Capouch says. "SIP was written by people who knew the internet but didn't know telephony."

The developers are enthusiastic about the work of Kristian Kielhofner, "a 21 year old genius," who has designed an embedded Asterisk install for x86 PCs. The idea is to build a $300 phone system for the third world, which they decide to call a "Phonode". They say that this is exactly what open source software is supposed to do—adapt to people's needs.

Now they're ready to talk CODECs. In our naïveté, we had always thought that a good CODEC delivered better compression, but it's not that simple. It's a trade off between compression, packet loss, jitter, and also the extent to which the CODEC can adjust to changing line conditions by changing the bit rate. "The wrong CODEC can turn a usable system into shit." Good to know that.

A bright VoIP future
Boehnlein says there's plenty to look forward to. Digium is about to release a supported business edition, which should spur the Asterisk community to develop more applications.

Capouch says two new features in the latest Asterisk version, currently in beta, should be of particular interest to ISPs. One feature allows a dumb box to be drop shipped to the end user. The box is initialized by the ISP. Authentication relies on the ISP, so if an errant customer is doing voice spam, the ISP can turn them off instantly.

The second feature is better encryption. "Not just the audio but everything is now encrypted."

Boehnlein adds that ISPs should pay attention to the e164 initiative which is trying to create a global directory of phone numbers that can be called for free over the internet. "If we don't hit the TDM network, that puts us under the Free World Dialup umbrella and we're not required to meet the FCC's E911 rules."

Of course, the most interesting part of the Asterisk future, as with every open source project, is the use that is not anticipated, and that's something we cannot predict.

—End