[Asterisk-Users] Re: www.openpbx.org

[Craig Guy]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "asterisk" <asterisk at totarotechnologies.com>
To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion" 
<asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 12:15 AM
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Re: www.openpbx.org

> The other thing that I think many are missing is the recent deal with 
> Intel
> and finally I remember that the Digium backed Asterisk Certification was
> unfair and pricy since many guru developers would still need to take the
> exam to become certified just to line a few people's pocket even thought
> they probably know more than the people teaching the cert course.
>
I don't really want to get sucked into the whole openpbx thing but I did 
just want to comment one point in this part:

I took the opportunity to do the Asterisk Certification Exam at Astricon 
Europe (I did not do the training course, however I did manage to pass).  My 
impression of the multi choice 'theory' part of the exam is that it was 
written deliberately to encourage people to undertake the paid training 
course.  A number of the questions were involved with stuff that someone 
building asterisk systems would never ever have to deal with or think about 
such as the vendors behind some of the VOIP standards, other esoteric 
historical information that would never be used, and various obscure 
asterisk command line switches and cli commands.  Of course, I'm sure that 
the paid training course has a couple hours devoted to such things.

The practical part of the exam showed a distinct USA bias - It was in terms 
of T1's and analog zap extensions.  I am from Australia, and the exam was in 
Europe, these parts of the world generally use BRI ISDN and PRI E1 with hdb3 
and crc4 line protocols and channel 16 as the D channel.  I'm not sure about 
Europe, but in Australia up until very recently the Zaptel analog cards were 
not certified for connection to the PSTN, which makes knowledge of them 
irrelevant for this part of the world.  I don't know how to configure a T1 
and I probably will never need to in my * career.  The certification testing 
should be regionalised for the specific country or part of the world it is 
being administered in.

Since the exam I have heard nothing, no congratulatory email, no certificate 
with a dCAP membership number, no login to a website or dCAP community forum 
etc.  No access to digium or asterisk logos to put on my business cards or 
website, no listing of certified people on the Digium website.  So at the 
moment I don't really see what benefit there is to paying a couple hundred 
dollars for the exam.  Sure, I tell people that I am certified, but if they 
ask for proof I have none to give.  I did email Digium about this and 
received a vague reply about printing up and mailing out some plaques at 
some time in the future.  To me it almost seems like Digium are treating 
their dCAPS as competition rather than partners given the lack of support to 
date.

Craig

>
> Thanks,
> Steve