Being in the telecom industry, voip has for a couple years now been "scaring the hell" out of the traditional telecom folks. Remember, the mindset of the old school telecom people is closed proprietary, which is why no phone system worked with any equipment or software other than its own, and the LEC provided the common pipe (Voice T1 or CO line). Could you imagine if these people were in charge of data-if you had an IBM computer, you would need an IBM keyboard, an IBM mouse, all IBM software, IBM server, etc.....Those days are gone, and I say good riddance.

Enter Asterisk. This is an amazing piece of work developed by the open source community. A PBX that doesn't require Right to Use fees every year, has as much or more horsepower than the traditional telco's, and can be integrated into any system you are using.

Asterisk even has an at home version now, so you can put a pbx in your house. We are currently running (ok-testing) an Asterisk PBX built for us by Toasterz. It is online and operational in a SIP mode right now and our next steps are to integrate into the Voice T1 and CO lines making it a truly functional PBX.

Will keep everyone up to date.