Page 23 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

Jim Van Meggelen
For me, it all started in the spring of 2004, sitting at my desk in the technical support
department of the telecom company I’d worked at for nearly 15 years. With no chal-
lenges to properly exercise the skills I had developed, I spent my time trying to figure
out what the rest of my career was going to look like. The telecommunications industry
had fallen from the pedestal of being a darling of investors to being a joke known to
even the most uninformed. I was supposed to feel fortunate to be one of the few who
still had work, but what thankless, purposeless work it was. We knew why our industry
had collapsed: the products we sold could not hope to deliver the solutions our cus-
tomers required—even though the industry promised that they could. They lacked
flexibility, and were priced totally out of step with the functionality they were delivering
(or, more to the point, were failing to deliver). Nowhere in the industry were there any
signs this was going to change any time soon.
I had been dreaming of an open source PBX for many long years, but I really didn’t
know how such a thing could ever come to be—I’d given up on the idea several years
before. I knew that to be successful, an open source PBX would need to effectively
bridge the worlds of legacy and network-based telecom. I always failed to find anything
that seemed ready.

Then, one fine day in spring, I half-heartedly seeded a Google search with the phrase
“open source telephony,” and discovered a bright new future for telecom: Asterisk, the
open source Linux PBX. †
There it was: the very thing I’d been dreaming of for so many years. I had no idea how
I was going to contribute, but I knew this: open source telephony was going to cause
a necessary and beneficial revolution in the telecom industry, and one way or another,
I was going to be a part of it.

For me, more of a systems integrator than developer, I needed a way to contribute to
the community. There didn’t seem to be a shortage of developers, but there sure was
a shortage of documentation. This sounded like something I could do. I knew how to
write, I knew PBXes, and I desperately needed to talk about this phenomenon that
suddenly made telecom fun again.
If I contribute only one thing to this book, I hope you will catch some of my enthusiasm
for the subject of open source telephony. This is an incredible gift we have been given,
but also an incredible responsibility. What a wonderful challenge. What a cosmic op-
portunity. What delicious fun!

† To get a sense of how big the Asterisk phenomenon is, type “PBX” into Google. As you look at the results,
bear in mind that the traditional PBX industry represents billions of dollars. The big players are companies
such as Avaya, Nortel, Siemens, Mitel, Cisco, NEC, and many, many more. It is somewhat telling that they
don’t seem to be concerned about how they rank in a Google search. As a cultural barometer, we’re pretty
sure this matters.

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