The most successful key telephone system in the world has a design limitation that has
survived 15 years of users begging for what appears to be a simple change: when you
determine the number of times your phone will ring before it forwards to voicemail,
you can choose from 2, 3, 4, 6, or 10 ring cycles. Have you any idea how many times
people ask for five rings? Plead as the customers might, the manufacturers of this system
cannot get their head around the idea that this is a problem. That’s the way it works,
they say, and users need to get over it.
Another example from the same system is that the name you program on your set can
only be seven characters in length. Back in the late 1980s, when this particular system
was designed, RAM was very expensive, and storing those seven characters for dozens
of sets represented a huge hardware expense. So what’s the excuse today? None. Are
there any plans to change it? Hardly—the issue is not even officially acknowledged as
a problem.
Those are just two examples; the industry is rife with them.Now, it’s all very well and good to pick on one system, but the reality is that every PBX
in existence suffers shortcomings. No matter how fully featured it is, something will
always be left out, because even the most feature-rich PBX will always fail to anticipate
the creativity of the customer. A small group of users will desire an odd little feature
that the design team either did not think of or could not justify the cost of building,
and, since the system is closed, the users will not be able to build it themselves.
If the Internet had been thusly hampered by regulation and commercial interests, it is
doubtful that it would have developed the wide acceptance it currently enjoys. The
openness of the Internet meant that anyone could afford to get involved. So, everyone
did. The tens of thousands of minds that collaborated on the creation of the Internet
delivered something that no corporation ever could have.
As with many other open source projects, such as Linux and the Internet, the devel-
opment of Asterisk was fueled by the dreams of folks who knew that there had to be
something more than what the industry was producing. The strength of the community
is that it is composed not of employees assigned to specific tasks, but rather of folks
from all sorts of industries, with all sorts of experiences, and all sorts of ideas about
what flexibility means, and what openness means. These people knew that if one could
take the best parts of various PBXes and separate them into interconnecting compo-
nents—akin to a boxful of LEGO bricks—one could begin to conceive of things that
would not survive a traditional corporate risk-analysis process. While no one can se-
riously claim to have a complete picture of what this thing should look like, there is no
shortage of opinions and ideas.#
Many people new to Asterisk see it as unfinished. Perhaps these people can be likened
to visitors to an art studio, looking to obtain a signed, numbered print. They often leave
disappointed, because they discover that Asterisk is the blank canvas, the tubes of paint,
the unused brushes waiting.*
Even at this early stage in its success, Asterisk is nurtured by a greater number of artists
than any other PBX. Most manufacturers dedicate no more than a few developers to
any one product; Asterisk has scores. Most proprietary PBXes have a worldwide sup-
port team comprised of a few dozen real experts; Asterisk has hundreds.
The depth and breadth of the expertise that surrounds this product is unmatched in
the telecom industry. Asterisk enjoys the loving attention of old Telco guys who
remember when rotary dial mattered, enterprise telecom people who recall when voi-cemail was the hottest new technology, and data communications geeks and coders
who helped build the Internet. These people all share a common belief—that the tel-
ecommunications industry needs a proper revolution.†
Asterisk is the catalyst |