[asterisk-users] Is Asterisk ready for Prime-Time?

[Steven Kurylo]

Bill Andersen wrote:
>    a) IF... I expect a phone system to just work.  Once it is
>       configured, a phone system should just work with
>       very little attention.  My previous system was a
>       Comdial with external voice mail on a DOS based PC.
>       I LITERALLY WENT OVER 4 YEARS WITHOUT HAVING TO REMOVE
>       POWER TO THE COMDIAL CONTROL OR RE-BOOT THE VOICE MAIL PC.
I don't think you'll ever find the reliability of those old solid state 
systems.  They have very few features and little to go wrong.  I don't 
judge my asterisk installations against those systems.  I judge asterisk 
against comparable systems, like a cisco voip systems or  a Nortel BCM.

While I can't say asterisk is more stable than they are, I can say the 
support is much better.  With closed systems I never quite know whats 
going on and get told to reboot regularly to fix problems (the days of a 
BCM taking 20 minutes to reboot during business hours of a call 
center...).  Or sometimes told the latest version will fix my problems, 
assuming I pay for it.  With asterisk I can tackle the issues myself and 
get a continually improving product with no extra charges.  The power of 
open source.