There is a revolution taking place in the VoIP industry. An open source solution, Asterisk by Digium, is offering the functionality only seen before in proprietary systems. The Internet is once again proving the axiom that information wants to be free - this time by accelerating the time it takes for a high-end technology to become available to anyone with a computer. The US market is reacting to this product as a number of small, low overhead companies launch their own VoIP services in competition with the larger players.

Asterisk

Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux, BSD and MacOSX and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more. Asterisk does voice over IP in many protocols, and can interoperate with almost all standards-based telephony equipment using relatively inexpensive hardware.

Features

Asterisk provides Voicemail services with Directory, Call Conferencing, Interactive Voice Response and Call Queuing. It has support for three-way calling, caller ID services, ADSI, SIP and H.323 (as both client and gateway).