Phones new location
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Someone mentioned they liked Asterisk, any reason to use them over FreePBX? or others?
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@Dashrender said:
Someone mentioned they liked Asterisk, any reason to use them over FreePBX? or others?
FreePBX, Ultimate PBX, Elastix, PIAF and many others are distros of Asterisk. Think of Asterisk like Linux. Everyone "talks" about using Linux but you never, ever just "get" Linux. You get a distro build on Linux like RHEL, Suse, CentOS, Ubuntu, etc. Same here. Think of Asterisk as a PBX kernel but you need a whole distro or else you are stuck building your own and that is a LOT of work. Normally it takes teams of people to pull that off.
So when people say that they use Asterisk, they mean that they use one of the any Asterisk distros.
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Generally FreePBX would be the first choice, Elastix second, these days.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Generally FreePBX would be the first choice, Elastix second, these days.
I'm interested in the new PIAF/Incredible PBX with all the Schmooze stuff removed.. It is on my task list to install it and give it a spin.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Generally FreePBX would be the first choice, Elastix second, these days.
I'm interested in the new PIAF/Incredible PBX with all the Schmooze stuff removed.. It is on my task list to install it and give it a spin.
Yes, when I finally have free time (um.... if) I'd really like to take a look at that too.
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@JaredBusch said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Generally FreePBX would be the first choice, Elastix second, these days.
I'm interested in the new PIAF/Incredible PBX with all the Schmooze stuff removed.. It is on my task list to install it and give it a spin.
I was going to look at that for my house, looks interesting. Although Schmooze has done a good job with the most recent FreePBX release.
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@coliver said:
I was going to look at that for my house, looks interesting. Although Schmooze has done a good job with the most recent FreePBX release.
Do not misunderstand that I think the FreePBX platform is suddenly bad. It is a great platform. But they are also no longer an independent company. Sangoma may stay hands off or they may tweak things to not be so freely workable.
I tried the Asterisk @Home platform like 6 years ago (I think) and it was obviously an abandoned branch as switchvox had been out for a couple years by this point.
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@JaredBusch said:
@coliver said:
I was going to look at that for my house, looks interesting. Although Schmooze has done a good job with the most recent FreePBX release.
Do not misunderstand that I think the FreePBX platform is suddenly bad. It is a great platform. But they are also no longer an independent company. Sangoma may stay hands off or they may tweak things to not be so freely workable.
No that wasn't my impression at all. Isn't FreePBX released under the GNU Public license? If Sangoma were to change things for the worse someone would probably fork the distro and fix it.
I tried the Asterisk @Home platform like 6 years ago (I think) and it was obviously an abandoned branch as switchvox had been out for a couple years by this point.
Never tried Asterisk @Home, it just seems like Asterisk is a great solution for a home phone system. Especially since I can setup a SIP client on my fiance's iPad so she can walk around the house with it. Although wireless SIP device really aren't that expensive either.
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FreePBX is open source, yes. But forking it is a big pain. I think someone would move past it and make a competitor rather than forking it. It just isn't good enough to fork
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@coliver said:
Never tried Asterisk @Home...
That's a product name, not a reference to using it at home.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@coliver said:
Never tried Asterisk @Home...
That's a product name, not a reference to using it at home.
Yep, I got that.
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I use Asterisk at home and have for years. It has been great. And because we use an IVR to get to us, it blocks ALL spam calling. No auto-dialer gets through to us.
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Pretty cool that everyone in the house gets their own voicemail too. So you don't leave voicemail for the house, but for a person in the house.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I use Asterisk at home and have for years. It has been great. And because we use an IVR to get to us, it blocks ALL spam calling. No auto-dialer gets through to us.
I dabbled with it a bit, but never got into "production". It was just a fun project to work on. Though it seems like having a home phone would be a good idea.... since we just use our cell phones now.
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Yeah, we don't like being without a home phone. We use VoicePulse and get four lines for the house (which is overkill.) You can do a little cheaper with voip.ms too. It's such a cheap thing to do and such good IT skill development. It's a great project. And you can run in house or do it cheaply on a cloud provider and get important experience there too.
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It's important for us because we will be living abroad and people will still get unlimited calling to us using a US phone number. They don't have to worry about where we are or what number we are currently using.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's important for us because we will be living abroad and people will still get unlimited calling to us using a US phone number. They don't have to worry about where we are or what number we are currently using.
In that event do you hook a client up to your cell phones too? In the event that you are out of the house?
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Yes, I have a client on my cell phone. Although in Europe we are unlikely to have good data plans on our cell phones.
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Who do you use to host? If it's not NTG, how much does it run? in writing this, I wonder if I asked you this before.
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@Dashrender said:
Who do you use to host? If it's not NTG, how much does it run? in writing this, I wonder if I asked you this before.
For me at home? I run through NTG's infrastructure, no reason not too. We need people testing constantly so using it for my home "production" is a very good test compared to an idle test environment.
If you were doing it on your own, no support and no need for special services you could get down to around $30 / month for everything, with four lines like I have. That includes a hosted VM plus the trunks.
