Overview - VoIP and PBX
[edit] Overview
Installing and maintaining an Asterisk-based PBX takes time and expertise even for the most seasoned system administrator. Managing a PBX is fundamentally different than managing something like a mail server. For this reason, we will have three different installation options for deploying an Asterisk-based PBX in ClarkConnect:
- A fully-supported third party module
- An unsupported community version of the third party module
- An unsupported FreePBX module
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More information on the third party module will be available in 2008. We apologize for the inconvenience. |
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Which option suits you? The summary table below outlines three different types of PBX user.
| Type of User |
Description |
Solution |
| Get It Done |
Users wanting to take control of their in-house PBX solution and just want it to work out of the box. |
Purchase the PBX software module from the third party. More information on this module will be announced in 2008. |
| Hackers |
Users willing to take the time to go through inevitable PBX growing pains. |
Use either the community version of the third party module, or FreePBX. Fine tuning of the software will be required -- for details, see Technical Challenges below. |
| Consultants |
Users who are already familiar with Asterisk and just want to manage an "all-in-one-box" solution. |
Install, maintain and support the free FreePBX solution bundled with ClarkConnect. |
[edit] Technical Challenges
[edit] Echo Cancellation
Managing echo issues on a PBX system is a challenge. Good: Asterisk provides a number of different algorithms to resolve echo. Bad: these algorithms can only be changed by rebuilding the Asterisk Zaptel driver -- it is not possible to simply use a configuration option.
Bottom line: you may need to have the ability to build software from source.
[edit] Drivers for 3rd Party Hardware
If you want to support third party hardware, it is not simply a matter of adding a new Linux driver to the system. Instead, the Asterisk Zaptel driver must be modified and maintained.
Bottom line: you may need to have the ability to patch and build software from source.
[edit] Asterisk Flavors
The company that manages the Asterisk software development (Digium) uses a software contributor license that has -- as a side effect -- created a cottage industry of different Asterisk flavors. The Asterisk contributors who prefer avoiding the contributor license will instead manage their software patches outside of the Asterisk source code base. Whereas Samba is virtually the same on every Linux distribution, Asterisk can be fundamentally different depending on which 3rd party patches are used. The spandsp software used for faxing is a common option added to Asterisk.
Bottom line: you may need to have the ability to patch and build software from source.
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