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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /><title>Massive Change Requires Flexible Technology</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css" type="text/css" /><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.69.1" /><link rel="start" href="index.html" title="Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony" /><link rel="up" href="asterisk-CHP-1.html" title="Chapter 1. A Telephony Revolution" /><link rel="prev" href="asterisk-CHP-1-SECT-1.html" title="VoIP: Bridging the Gap Between Traditional and Network Telephony" /><link rel="next" href="asterisk-CHP-1-SECT-3.html" title="Asterisk: The Hacker’s PBX" /></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">Massive Change Requires Flexible Technology</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="asterisk-CHP-1-SECT-1.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">Chapter 1. A Telephony Revolution</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="asterisk-CHP-1-SECT-3.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr /></div><div class="sect1" lang="en" xml:lang="en"><div class="titlepage"><div><div><h2 class="title" style="clear: both"><a id="asterisk-CHP-1-SECT-2"></a>Massive Change Requires Flexible Technology</h2></div></div></div><p>The most<a id="ch01_teleflexi" class="indexterm"></a> successful key telephone system in the world has a design
limitation that has survived 15 years of users begging for what appears to
be a simple change: when you determine the number of times your phone will
ring before it forwards to voicemail, you can choose from 2, 3, 4, 6, or
10 ring cycles. Have you any idea how many times people ask for five
rings? Plead as the customers might, the manufacturers of this system
cannot get their head around the idea that this is a problem. That’s the
way it works, they say, and users need to get over it.</p><p>Another example from the same system is that the name you program on
your set can only be seven characters in length.<sup>[<a id="id4102037" href="#ftn.id4102037">7</a>]</sup> Back in the late 1980s, when this particular system was
designed, RAM was very expensive, and storing those seven characters for
dozens of sets represented a huge hardware expense. So what’s the excuse
today? None. Are there any plans to change it? Hardly—the issue is not
even officially acknowledged as a problem.</p><p>Those are just two examples; the industry is rife with them.</p><p>Now, it’s all very well and good to pick on one system, but the
reality is that every<a id="I_indexterm1_tt16" class="indexterm"></a> PBX in existence suffers shortcomings. No matter how fully
featured it is, something will always be left out, because even the most
feature-rich PBX will always fail to anticipate the creativity of the
customer. A small group of users will desire an odd little feature that
the design team either did not think of or could not justify the cost of
building, and, since the system is closed, the users will not be able to
build it themselves.</p><p>If the Internet had been thusly hampered by regulation and
commercial interests, it is doubtful that it would have developed the wide
acceptance it currently enjoys. The openness of the Internet meant that
anyone could afford to get involved. So, everyone did. The tens of
thousands of minds that collaborated on the creation of the Internet
delivered something that no corporation ever could have.</p><p>As with many other open source projects, such as Linux and the
Internet, the development of Asterisk was fueled by the dreams of folks
who knew that there had to be something more than what the industry was
producing. The strength of the community is that it is composed not of
employees assigned to specific tasks, but rather of folks from all sorts
of industries, with all sorts of experiences, and all sorts of ideas about
what flexibility means, and what openness means. These people knew that if
one could take the best parts of various PBXes and separate them into
interconnecting components—akin to a boxful of LEGO bricks—one could begin
to conceive of things that would not survive a traditional corporate
risk-analysis process. While no one can seriously claim to have a complete
picture of what this thing should look like, there is no shortage of
opinions and ideas.<sup>[<a id="id4101738" href="#ftn.id4101738">8</a>]</sup></p><p>Many people new to Asterisk see it as unfinished. Perhaps these
people can be likened to visitors to an art studio, looking to obtain a
signed, numbered print. They often leave disappointed, because they
discover that Asterisk is the blank canvas, the tubes of paint, the unused
brushes waiting.<sup>[<a id="id4101748" href="#ftn.id4101748">9</a>]</sup></p><p>Even at this early stage in its success, Asterisk is nurtured by a
greater number of artists than any other PBX. Most manufacturers dedicate
no more than a few developers to any one product; Asterisk has scores.
Most proprietary PBXes have a worldwide support team comprised of a few
dozen real experts; Asterisk has hundreds.</p><p>The depth and breadth of the expertise that surrounds this product
is unmatched in the telecom industry. Asterisk enjoys the loving attention
of old Telco guys who <span class="keep-together">remember</span> when
rotary dial mattered, enterprise telecom people who recall when voicemail
was the hottest new technology, and data communications geeks and coders
who helped build the Internet. These people all share a common belief—that
the telecommunications industry needs a <span class="emphasis"><em>proper</em></span>
revolution.<sup>[<a id="asterisk-CHP-1-FN-3" href="#ftn.asterisk-CHP-1-FN-3">10</a>]</sup></p><p>Asterisk is the catalyst.<a id="I_indexterm1_tt18" class="indexterm"></a></p><div class="footnotes"><br /><hr width="100" align="left" /><div class="footnote"><p><sup>[<a id="ftn.id4102037" href="#id4102037">7</a>] </sup>If your name is Elizabeth, for example, you will have to figure
something else out like elizbth, or elizabe, or perhaps lizabth. OK,
so liz might serve as well, but you get the point.</p></div><div class="footnote"><p><sup>[<a id="ftn.id4101738" href="#id4101738">8</a>] </sup>From the release of Asterisk 1.2 to Asterisk 1.4, there have
been over 4,000 updates to the code in the SVN repository.</p></div><div class="footnote"><p><sup>[<a id="ftn.id4101748" href="#id4101748">9</a>] </sup>It should be noted that these folks need not leave disappointed.
Several projects have arisen to lower the barriers to entry for
Asterisk. By far the most popular and well known is <a id="I_indexterm1_tt17" class="indexterm"></a>trixbox (<a href="http://www.trixbox.org" target="_top">http://www.trixbox.org</a>). If you
have an old PC lying around (or a copy of VMware), trixbox will build
a GUI-based PBX for you simply by answering a few questions during the
automated install process. This does not make it easier to learn
Asterisk, because you are no longer involved in the platform or
dialplan configuration, but it will deliver a working PBX to you much
faster than the more hands-on approach we employ in this book.</p></div><div class="footnote"><p><sup>[<a id="ftn.asterisk-CHP-1-FN-3" href="#asterisk-CHP-1-FN-3">10</a>] </sup>The telecom industry has been predicting a revolution since
before the crash; time will tell how well they respond to the
<span class="emphasis"><em><span class="emphasis"><em>open source</em></span></em></span>
revolution.</p></div></div></div><div class="navfooter"><hr /><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="asterisk-CHP-1-SECT-1.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="asterisk-CHP-1.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="asterisk-CHP-1-SECT-3.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">VoIP: Bridging the Gap Between Traditional and Network
Telephony </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> Asterisk: The Hacker’s PBX</td></tr></table></div><div xmlns="" id="svn-footer"><hr /><p>You are reading <em>Asterisk: The Future of Telephony</em> (2nd Edition for Asterisk 1.4), by Jim van Meggelen, Jared Smith, and Leif Madsen.<br />
This work is licensed under the <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works License v3.0</a>.<br />
To submit comments, corrections, or other contributions to the text, please visit <a href="http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596510480/">http://www.oreilly.com/</a>.</p></div></body></html>
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