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November 28th, 2008

Previously I had compressed this the wrong way with a result of chipmunk voices.

Corrected and pretty cool! Frognet started in 1996 as a dial-up ISP company. The availability of open source telephony software is only one part of the business operation equation. Other real costs to manage an ISP business include price of equipment acquisition, human capital, training, data conversion and integration. More importantly, finding and hiring motivated CS talent must be factored into this equation.

In a frank conversation with Chip Swanson, CEO, and David Broeckelman-Post from Frognet, and IPiFony’s Matthew Hardeman, the three discuss the other costs for internet service providers. Digium’s Asterisk open source software helps new internet service providers bring soft switch applications including VOIP and other telephony services to the marketplace. DIDX was a media sponsor for ISPCon 2008. Brian Coburn and Anne Tredway recorded this discussion at the San Jose Conference Center in November.

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I started recording this section with John Todd’s slide Multi-Dimensional Niche: Mobile! Open BTS for example is a GSM bay station. This was available to cell phones at Burning Man via the IP side. Calls went out over Asterisk and then to a WIFI trunk and then to a SIP termination provider. Check out more information on telephony at Burning Man on Brad Templeton’s website at http://www.templetons.com/pq/.

Stand-Alone Niches

1. Analog to SIP

2. Failover as core or edge

3. SBC-ish tasks

4. Multi-tenant aggregator

5. Semi-intelligent edge router (E911)

6. H323 to SIP

7. SIP/ISDN to SS7

An asterisk machine goes for $500 with 24 channels… session border controller-ish tasks, hide topology, protocol conversion …

You’ve got to listen to his description of a customer of SIP and ISDN and their success using the latest version of Asterisk with 8.6 million calls in 10 weeks with no down time. Who are the Asterisk-based providers serving? Call centers, calling card platforms overseas, alternative to traditional PBX, They are often a part of the Asterisk developing community. They have hired many of the original developer hackers of the Asterisk community.

Find out why Asterisk is more relevant than ever. Watch the four clips I recorded at ISPCON in San Jose, CA in November 2008.

(My colleagues Anne Tredway and Bryan Coburn and I recorded 50 or so videos of ISPCON participants. ISPCON holds a secret stash of telecommunications intelligentsia. This was the first time we attended, and we look forward to next year.)

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ohn starts his presentation with something like … instead of fearing PBX vendors who offer an alternative to traditional PBX, go the easy route and make them your ally. Resell IP PBX from an outsourced vendor and ensure quality of service since you control the network as an ISP.

On the other hand, John says, “Mobile phones fail on service and flexibility.”

(I was wondering if he has tried the Nokia e61i? I have one since May 2008 and find it a very useful and flexible tool. But then again, it is very difficult to find one. They are more popular in Europe and Asia and more easily available there from the local mobile companies. See my blog posts on mobile voip at http://suzanne.supertec.com/search?q=mobile+voip.)

Todd believes the mobile phone has not replaced the landline as the top choice of telephony. He mentions the IPhone as an example of inflexibility for business use.

(Check out the article that compares a Blackberry Storm to an IPhone at http://www.newsoxy.com/blackberry/article11516.html.)

Asterisk assists you to provide more interesting services more quickly. No matter where you use Asterisk whether at the customer premise or in your switching center, Asterisk can make your company clearly a better choice unless your competition also uses Asterisk.

John Todd states, “In which case, you’ve got to rely on that fundamental that you’ve got which is the network.”

And I guess he means here that the better quality your network and because of the control that ISPs have to manage their network, the better they can compete with other ISPs who use Asterisk who may not manage as well. But I personally think that customer service and company leadership matter just as much.

Most ISPs in the audience at ISPCON are selling PBX services and POTS and really SIP trunking which displaces existing vendors is basically what John added. He shared a chart with us

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John usually talks to audiences who are very unhappy because they don’t own the network nor have control over QoS, but WISPs and other ISPs attending ISPCON are in control and do own the network. The voice they sell can be as good or bad as they are willing to enable with the power they have.

Asterisk is a viable tool to provide voIP. Often used as a telephony toolkit, as voie application, set of APIs, and PBX. Decide to make the call go over SIP or PRI or SS7 link. The APIs give call control over other interfaces for web 2.0 apps, pre-existing database to make calls out… The PBX is very popular worldwide.

“You’re using Asterisk. You just don’t know it.”

Asterisk experienced more than a million downloads in 2008. Watch the video for more info and stats. This video was recorded by me Suzanne during ISPcon 2008.

If you the ISP or WISP is not using and selling Asterisk-based product, who is? That’s a question Todd posed. I would say, “Someone is. No, many are.”

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This is first of four recordings of John Todd presenting on Asterisk at ISPCON 2008.

“Asterisk is the hammer for all voice nails,” says John. He encourages the audience to be skeptical and test the thoughts and ideas he shares at ISPCON in San Jose, California during 2008.

This if the first of four video recording of John Todd’s talk on Asterisk at ISPCON.

Hear the Telecom Reality in Shona in Zimbabwe

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Some great Zimbabwe Online guys and Danny Ngai of Jaxtr discuss telecommunications situation in Zimbabwe in English and in a common Zimbabwean language Shona at ISPCON 2008 in San Jose.

… browse some of our team’s other blogs at http://blogs.didx.net and http://blog.tmcnet.com/monetizing-ip-communications/. You’re welcome to comment, contribute, and collaborate any time.