[Asterisk-Users] Re: Sorry, Newbie here

[Jason Kawakami]

----- Original Message ----- 
> Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Sorry, Newbie here
> To: <asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
> Message-ID: <005c01c4915e$5c8cc820$0000fea9 at lohr1>
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>
>     I never heard of Asterisk before today, but from what i'm looking at
on the website and hearing, it sounds pretty incredibly.  If I understand
correctly with a 1,500.00 Wildcard TE410p T1 card, a good BSD or Linux
Server, and a couple IP phones or Netmeeting on a few workstations, and of
course, Asterisk which is free; I call have a small call center.
>
>     This can't be?  I was looking at tens of thousands for a Cisco
solution.  Any comments or insight is welcome.
>

after working the telecom industry for the past 10 years i can tell you to
believe it.  your statement is absolutely true

dont kid yourself though, * has some gotchas especially in call center
functionality, and * requires learning from scratch how open source software
developers interpreted what hardware engineers have done for the past 30
years.  if you have experience in implementing open source solutions and
some telephony background you can build just about anything you want to do
with a telephone and a computer with *.  usually there is a trade off in
cost (read capital expenditure) and installation and maint of these
solutions.

i would suggest to you contacting a consultant (check the listings on
voip-info.org) and contact someone near you about your requirements.  or do
what we all did and download the software from CVS and dive in.

welcome to the brave new world

Jason Kawakami
www.optellabs.com