[Asterisk-doc] As promised, some internals docs

[Jared Smith]

On Sat, 2005-02-05 at 15:54 -0800, Chief Charles Ugo. Eke wrote:
> Gee that was one heck of encouragement, thanks

I'm sorry if I came off as cold or rude -- that wasn't my intention.
But from the way you worded your email, it sounded like you wanted us to
give you step-by-step on how to build a telco.

There are a lot of guides to getting Asterisk up and running, many of
them even include the exacts steps you'll need.  But I guess the point
I'm trying to make is that there's a huge chasm between getting an
Asterisk server running for the first time, and being able to run a
telco on Asterisk.

Now don't get me wrong -- I love Asterisk to death, and it's very
powerful and absolutely amazing in the things it can do.  Unfortunately,
it's very hard to learn all about Asterisk in a short amount of time.
It's a very complex piece of software.  I won't lie to you -- it's very
hard to get telco-class service out of Asterisk.  While Asterisk will
certainly handle it (and does, for lots of people), it's getting the
Asterisk *experience* that's difficult.  I would dare say that you
probably need at least three to six months of *solid* Asterisk
experience before you can expect to run a telco on Asterisk.  I know
that seems like a huge investment of time (and you probably think I'm
exaggerating), but Asterisk isn't something you can learn over a weekend
and deploy overnight.  It's just not that easy.  There's a lot of things
you'll probably need to learn about telecom, and a lot of Asterisk
quirks you'll need to learn about.

So, that's why Leif and I started this documentation project -- to make
the first piece (the "Hey, I've got Asterisk up and taking calls" piece)
as easy as possible for new beginners.  And we're constantly working on
getting better documentation.  But in my wildest dreams I can't think
we'll ever document all the knowledge that is required to run an
Asterisk-based telco.  There's just too much to be able to document it
all!

In short, I hope I haven't scared you off -- I promise that if you take
the time and learn Asterisk, you'll be amazed with what it can do.  That
being said, I want to make sure you understand that the road ahead is
not an easy or necessarily documented (yet!) one.

-Jared