FreePBX Moves on and Up !!!

In the past we mentioned that Fonality caused a few waves in the Opensource Community by developing their own version of FreePBX to work more closely with their Trixbox product, it seems that FreePBX has now entered the hands of bandwidth.com by hiring the project’s main developer as its Open Source Community Developer and is said to be committing significant resources and effort to expand the scope of the project.

An informal announcement of bandwidth.com’s commitment to FreePBX came through the main developer Philippe Lindheimer’s blog at www.freepbx.org on 14th November in a post called “A Bright Future for FreePBX.” Lindheimer said he had “joined forces” with bandwidth.com as its Open Source Community Director and indicated both he and bandwidth.com would work to expand the scope of FreePBX and to assure it remains “open and strong.”

Lindheimer cited bandwidth.com’s efforts in purchasing the FreePBX trademark and its efforts with FreeSwitch as areas where the company has been helpful to the open source community. Since bandwidth.com sells VoIP and data services not software then there appears to be no conflict of interest.

This is the latest coup for FreePBX; the web based GUI provides preprogrammed functionality and ease of use on top of Asterisk, including features such as follow me, ring groups with calls confirmation, music on hold, conferencing, and paging and intercom functionality for many SIP phones. Digium incorporated FreePBX into its compilation of the AsteriskNow 1.5 turnkey release in October.

See the blog entry here.

BT Say Move to VoIP is Accelerating

We see that British Telecom has released one of it’s regular VoIP surveys, which they say showed increased adoption rates and planned VoIP expenditures over the next two years. Half of the respondents to the survey planned to increase VoIP expenditures during next year.

Demonstrating the Return on Investment of moving from a PSTN system to VoIP services was listed by the highest percentage (27%) of respondents as the main hurdle for a move to VoIP. Network reliability, voice quality and security were the three most important considerations for managers considering the migration to VoIP products; these three concerns were also the top concerns for the BT surveys conducted in 2005 and 2007. Around 25% of respondents stated that they were planning on switching to an IP-based network in the next year. 

Read the survey in full here

Implementation Problems for VoIP or Unified Comms

We saw a great article over at processor.com that descibes problems and pitfalls to watch out for if you are implementing VoIP or Unified Communications – the key points listed are:

• Converged Network Woes
• Ageing Networks will not fly
• Business Issues Bog Down Process
• Beware the UC Promise
• Network Threats Plague Voice Systems

We have discussed many of these points in the past but it is useful to see the warnings laid out in a single article – the key points to watch for are:

Voice data is far more sensitive than other network data, in turn requiring specific planning and troubleshooting to avoid latency, jitter, and other quality related problems inherent in VoIP and UC technologies.

Because IP based voice systems reside on the same architecture that can suffer traditional network based attacks, it’s imperative to ensure that these systems are included in the overall enterprise security policy.

See the article Here