[Asterisk-Users] I give up!!

[costas]

This is a traumatic story. Maybe you can help the rest of us who are making business decisions using *.

Will you or client be looking at any other SIP alternatives? 
Do you think any problems were with the phone sets themselves?

Again, sorry to hear of your troubles.

---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: "Dave Alan Caruana" <david at melita.net>
Reply-To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
Date:  Thu, 16 Oct 2003 15:21:02 +0200

>i've just lost $2000 dollars or so on my first commercial asterisk
>installation ..
>i'm running a PIV class server, three Digium Wildcard FXO cards, and
>10 Grandstream Budgettone SIP phones. The system was to be a PBX
>for a small company. After over 2 months of pissing about, the client has
>had his fill of asterisk problems, and asked me to take my equipment
>out of the building. Obviously, I haven't been paid for anything.
>
>The problems I faced were the following :
>- initially a problem with asterisk crashing totally when there wasn't an
>extension
>  to ring .. though this was fixed in a subsequent CVS, it was causing
>downtime.
>  the client has no unix knowledge, and a script I put in to kick in the
>asterisk
>  when it shut itself down didn't seem to always work.
>
>  it also reduced the quality of my subsequent callout requests to something
>on
>  the lines of "the phone server is crashed again" regardless of what the
>problem was
>
>- a dialplan problem, where one phone was ringing 10 seconds after the
>others,
>   at the client's request and they were hearing other phones ring and
>picking up
>   a non-ringing phone (ok, I can't really blame that on asterisk ..)
>
>- echo on the lines .. that after much fiddling around with configurations
>went from
>   terrible to borderline acceptable. To people not used to digital
>telephony and
>   computer stuff, the echo was VERY annoying. They used to avoid the phones
>   because they said people would not understand them.
>
>- no consultative transfer. The closest I got was to park the call, call the
>other party,
>  tell him "a voce" which line the call is parked on and then get him to
>pick up the call.
>  This is, in my opinion, a very basic feature that is missing on asterisk.
>The park/
>  pick up sequence proved too difficult for the clients' secretaries to
>grasp.
>
>- I could not get G729 working properly (license paid up, G729 up and
>running). In
>  the absence of a manual, the fault solving process was something like "ask
>a question
>  on the mailing list, get a few answers, go to the client, try it out,
>fail, go back home,
>  send another question on the mailinglist" with about 48 hours for each
>iteration. I was
>  also appearing a real chimp "expermimenting" stuff at the clients' office.
>
>At this point I decided to cut my losses, retreive the equipment and call it
>a day.
>When asterisk is well documented and released in stable releases, I will
>willingly
>consider it again. I would be willing to pay for a stable, documented
>version of
>asterisk. It is a lovely software, and to begin with I was very enthusiastic
>about it.
>I do understand that the support community is helpful, but the current
>status of things
>limits asterisk to a hobbyist scenario or at least somewhere where there is
>an engineer
>with lots of linux experience and patience online 24 hours to solve problems
>as they
>crop up.
>
>If anyone would like a couple of second hand FXO boards, contact me. I have
>already found a home for the grandstreams.
>
>cheers
>Dave
>
>_______________________________________________
>Asterisk-Users mailing list
>Asterisk-Users at lists.digium.com
>http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
>

--
Costas Menico
Meezon Software Corp
201-224-8111
costas at meezon.com

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