[asterisk-users] PBX selection

[J Montoya or A J Stiles]

On Monday 17 Apr 2017, Speed Boy wrote:
>  Hi all, I'm new to VoIP, now we have a project that needs a
>  PBX with client APPs.
> In our team we have argument for choosing PBX. By so far, we
>  have following candidates:
> 
> A: Open source
> 
>      1) Asterisk PBX (http://www.asterisk.org) (with longest
>  history that almost every one knows it, now the last version using the
> PJSIP stack)
>      2) FreeSwitch (http://www.freeswitch.org) (A lot people
>  recommended it to us)
> 
> 
> B: Commercial
> 
>     1) Vodia PBX (http://www.vodia.com). It comes from SNOM, now
> acquired by a HongKong company now
>     2) PortSIP PBX (http://www.portsip.com/portsip-pbx). It
> also includes VoIP SDK, WebRTC and offer rebranding app for free.
> 
> My boss prefers the Open Source PBX since they are free,
> but our CTO prefers the commercial editions, according to
> whom the business PBX has better support, and the
> performance is good, and easy to use - considering our team
> all are new to VoIP/PBX.

Proponents of proprietary solutions always like to say "If an Open Source 
solution breaks, who can you call?"  The answer is, "Any sufficiently-competent 
programmer -- it may be broken, but we have all the pieces".  Whereas if you 
spend money on proprietary software and it breaks, then there is only *one* 
place you can call -- and you'd better hope they are interested to fix your 
problem.

On the other hand, if you could get full Source Code and Modification Rights  
(basically, "everything we could do with a GPL program except distribute 
copies"),  a proprietary solution might not be so bad after all.  But since 
the goal of most proprietary software vendors is to extract money from you and 
maintaining you in a state of perpetual helplessness is highly desirable in 
the course of this, do not expect to get such a deal in real life.
 
> We have did some searching of Asterisk, here are my questions:
> 
> 1. Does the last Asterisk using PJSIP stack ?

Yes.

> 2. Does there has the comparison of PJSIP and reSIProcate, sofia(using by
> FreeSwicth) ?

Not sure about this.  We're still using the original chan_sip driver.

> 3. Is it easy to compile and setup Asterisk?

It's about as easy as compiling anything from Source Code.  Harder than LAME 
MP3 encoder, but easier than the Linux kernel.  If you altered `monop` from 
the BSDgames package to make the streets match your local edition of the game, 
you will have no problem whatsoever with building Asterisk.

If you understand the process of what you are doing -- basically, setting up 
an automated process that will examine your server hardware and software 
configuration  (configure),  choosing which parts of Asterisk you want to 
include  (make menuselect),  compiling the selected human-readable Source Code 
into binary code that the computer can understand natively  (make)  and then 
moving the compiled binary code and configuration files from the Source Code 
folder to where the computer is expecting for them to be  (make install)  then 
you should not have too many problems.

It is always preferrable to compile your own Asterisk to fit your hardware and 
include just the bits you want, rather than rely on anyone else's pre-compiled 
package.

> 4. Which Asterisk version is recommended?

The latest one.

> And does Asterisk support Windows
> ?

You can certainly use Windows softphones to talk to Asterisk, but Asterisk 
itself requires a non-toy underlying operating system.  Ubuntu and CentOS are 
the best-supported Linux distributions.  Asterisk has also been seen working, 
to greater or lesser extents, on Solaris and the BSDs.  But Linux was the 
original development environment  (although one of the two original projects 
that ended up merging and becoming Asterisk, many years ago, was originally 
developed on FreeBSD),  and is what most Asterisk telephonistas know.

Any hardware which is capable of running Windows can, of course, run Linux; 
and usually better.

-- 
JM or AJS

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