My friend Leon called me up to ask for my opinion on turning an XBox into some sort of VoIP/PABX device and solution. He wanted to know whether he is likely to hear from Microsoft lawyers. I pointed out that (1) the XBox only has one Ethernet port and (2) thanks to Moore’s Law, they are no longer good value for the money. But I digress.
It turned out that the plan was to use Asterisk, a full-blown and highly flexible PABX software system, to turn a Intel PC into a VoIP/PABX device. I gave it some thought about a year ago, but left it at that. I am no telecom expert, and wouldn’t know anyone who would want to buy a PABX from me. Personally I have no need for a PABX system at home, as our mobile phones serve us very well. Nonetheless, Asterisk is a very interesting piece of software and has attracted a lot of attention over the last couple of years.
With the proper hardware interfaces, Asterisk is able to grab a bunch of POTS lines, an ISDN line, an ADSL line or a T1 or whatever, and distribute them among a bunch of old telephones, soft phones running on PCs and Cisco IP phones. Because it is fully programmable, call routing, transfer, conference, internal calls, voice mails, etc. are all a piece of cake.
Vontage has Simul-Ring, which rings the main phone and another phone of your choice simultaneously. This is a killer feature which no phone service provider in Hong Kong I know of offers, but is easily done with Asterisk if you have more than one phone line. Come to think of it, there is no reason why the Cisco IP phone system we are using at the office can’t do this, but it doesn’t.
Source a decent server-class system, put in the right hardware interfaces and install Asterisk, and you have a PABX system that costs about the same as low to mid-range cheap dedicated PABX hardware, but is far more capable and flexible. Put a bunch of those smart-looking Cisco IP phones into the package, it would be highly competitive in cost and features. And because all the customers see are famous names such as Cisco/IBM/HP/Dell (Asterisk doesn’t even need to be mentioned, as the backend really is of no conern to them) they would be far more comfortable making their purchase decisions.