Jim Van Meggelen’s Blog

VoIP technology makes it easy to interconnect between systems. It is likely that many VoIP enabled companies don’t even realize that all the technology already exists to route calls across internet connections using the same numbering plan the PSTN uses.

Initiatives such as ENUM have already developed the protocols to handle this, and if you have a next-generation open-source PBX, you already have this technology.

What I’m not sure is when the tipping point will be. For any company to take advantage of what amounts to free long distance calling anywhere in the world, two things have to happen: 1) you have to be referenced in the ENUM databases, and 2) any company you wish to call has to similarly be referenced.

The technology is ready. Next we have to figure out how to get everybody on board.

Randy Resnick and the fine folks of the VoIP Users Conference kindly invited me to join them for a chat.

We ended up having a very interesting conversation about building small, inexpensive systems that would compete on price with a traditional key system, but then also started talking about high availability. Two subjects that would not generally be part of the same conversation, which is just another example of why open source telecom is so important.

Check it out:

http://www.voipusersconference.org/2009/05/jmv-build-system/

Those of us head-down in this business of open source and emerging telecom will sometimes lose sight of the big picture. So busy with the day-to-day routine of running our respective businesses, we need to raise our eyes from the grindstone every now and then and have a look at the landscape.

A study recently done by the Eastern Management Group looked to quantify open source PBX adoption. The results show that open source telecom has been wildly successful.

This is personally satisfying, because I predicted in the first edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony that open source PBXs were going to change the telecom industry. I was not alone in this belief; it was something that was very obvious to those of us immersed in this space. Telecom had lost it’s soul, and we had found it back.

Two weeks ago I was at the Amoocon conference in Rostock, Germany. Conferences are important to someone like me. Our industry is still very grass-roots, and if we don’t hang out with our peers every now and then, we run the risk of losing sight of the big picture.

Open source telecom is alive and well, and still taking over the world.