There is more to being a good VoIP telephony provider for Asterisk users than simply offering the best balance of price and reliability. Usability is also very important. Here are some things which make for a service more convenient for Asterisk users.

I was recently asked whether anyone would every really consider replacing a tired old PBX with an open source system and whether we had any experience with Asterisk. Here is the answer I wrote, based on our experience here at Trinity College.

Do you have an Asterisk box and an underutilized T1? Or do you have a large number of DID numbers on your PBX? Why not join a DUNDi cloud and trade access to your numbers or to your local calling area for access to other organizations’ numbers and local calling areas?

I run a VoIP network for my friends and family. There are phones at about 10 locations. Four of the locations have Asterisk servers.

Three of the Asterisk servers are run in a redundant configuration. SIP query DNS to get the list of servers for our domain and try connecting to them in the order specified by the domain’s SRV record. It does not matter to which server the SIP phone ultimately connects because the servers are connected by DUNDi. When one of the phones is called, the server which receives the call uses DUNDi to determine with which server the phone is registered and routes the call to that server over IAX2.

I have a new Asterisk server at home. It is a Contec IPC-BX/M600(PCW). This is a wall-mount PC. It is about a foot square and about two inches thick. There is no power brick. The power cord plugs directly into the box. It has a 400MHz processor which should be fast enough for home or small-office use. It has only 64MBytes of RAM, so you need some swap, particularly when compiling Asterisk.

I bought this marvel new on E-Bay for about $55 including shipping. I added a laptop hard disk for storage.

Power consumption is reasonable, about 15 watts when idle.