Page 347 - Asterisk™: The Future of Telephony

As for Asterisk, it embraces both the past and the future: H.323 support is available,
although the community has for the most part shunned H.323 in favor of the IETF
protocol SIP and the darling of the Asterisk community, IAX.

Limited Standards Compliancy

One of the oddest things about all of the standards that exist in the world of legacy
telecommunications is the various manufacturers’ seeming inability to implement them
consistently. Each manufacturer desires a total monopoly, so the concept of intero-
perability tends to take a back seat to being first to market with a creative new idea.

The ISDN protocols are a classic example of this. Deployment of ISDN was (and in
many ways still is) a painful and expensive proposition, as each manufacturer decided
to implement it in a slightly different way. ISDN could very well have helped to usher
in a massive public data network, 10 years before the Internet. Unfortunately, due to
its cost, complexity, and compatibility issues, ISDN never delivered much more than
voice, with the occasional video or data connection for those willing to pay. ISDN is
quite common (especially in Europe, and in North America in larger PBX implemen-
tations), but it is not delivering anywhere near the capabilities that were envisioned for
it.
As VoIP becomes more and more ubiquitous, the need for ISDN will disappear.

Slow Release Cycles

It can take months, or sometimes years, for the big guys to admit to a trend, let alone
release a product that is compatible with it. It seems that before a new technology can
be embraced, it must be analyzed to death, and then it must pass successfully through
various layers of bureaucracy before it is even scheduled into the development cycle.
Months or even years must pass before any useful product can be expected. When those
products are finally released, they are often based on hardware that is obsolete; they
also tend to be expensive and to offer no more than a minimal feature set.
These slow release cycles simply don’t work in today’s world of business communica-
tions. On the Internet, new ideas can take root in a matter of weeks and become viable
in extremely short periods of time. Since every other technology must adapt to these
changes, so too must telecommunications.
Open source development is inherently better able to adapt to rapid technological
change, which gives it an enormous competitive advantage.
The spectacular crash of the telecom industry may have been caused in large part by
an inability to change. Perhaps that continued inability is why recovery has been so
slow. Now, there is no choice: change, or cease to be. Community-driven technologies
such as Asterisk will see to that.

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