There are very few people in South Africa who are unaware of the many disruptive changes happening  in the telecommunication industry when it comes to the telephony service providers in South Africa. Like me, I am sure that many are expecting to have significant savings from the reduction in call costs that are expected. What is odd though, is that most seem unaware of the massive cost savings that are now possible when it comes to their PBX.

If you recently installed the latest version of your favorite Asterisk distribution and then proceeded to go ahead and configure the drivers for the PSTN interface cards as per usual using the Zaptel drivers and tools, you may have met with a nasty surprise. The Zaptel drivers have been replaced by the newer DAHDI drivers.

Asterisk IP-PBX server  has so many benefits, and such a competitive cost, that it I often take it for granted that people know what these benefits are, but this is not the case. In my last blog I covered the most common mistake companies make when implementing Asterisk, in this blog post I wish to look at the other column, namely: "What are the benefits of Asterisk?".

Asterisk IP-PBX/VOIP server has the potential to drastically cut the cost of telephony infrastructure for any organisation that embraces it. It provides flexibility and features unmatched by any proprietary option, but if the implementation and deployment of Asterisk is not planned and budgeted for correctly, these benefits may not be realised.

The Asterisk podcast I did recently with Darlene Parker from http://www.userful.com, has been released on Hacker Public Radio. The asterisk podcast can be found here . I hope its anyone interested in Asterisk and how it can be deployed in call centres and small and medium businesses.

When setting up a call centre that makes use of Asterisk one of the larger expenses comes from the cost per call centre seat. In many cases each agent get his own computer that will allow them to do post and pre call work, fill out forms and other admin tasks to close calls and deals. It is also often used to provide the agent with a soft-phone to make calls.

In the current economic climate many companies are downgrading from expensive diginet lines, with their low bandwidth and high cost, to bonded ADSL which allows up to 20Mbps download speeds and up to 2Mbps upload speed.  But bonded ADSL can also be used to cut costs by providing cheap and abundant bandwidth for a VOIP trunk for your IP-PBX, such as Asterisk, an

In this short video I demonstrate some of the steps necessary to setup an Asterisk server for an SME using Duxbury, sinlge port, ICASA approved, BRI cards. These are cheap BRI cards from Duxbury and cost around R300 that can be used to setup a fully functioning IP PBX for an SME. The video demonstration does not cover all the steps necessary as some of this is easier to follow via a written tutorial.

Small businesses looking to:

1. Deploy a PBX;
2. Set-up a voice-mail system
3. Lower maintenance costs
4. Set-up an Interactive Voice Response
5. Enjoy VoIP

can now turn to Asterisk, a software based PBX system that has taken over from traditional PBXs.

Sales of traditional PBXs and key systems have moderated in recent years. Experts attribute this to a variety of factors. Companies, they report, are just keeping their phone systems longer. The wave of Y2K replacements that flooded the market, now almost a decade later, are still in working order. Demand is affected by the economy; enough said. True, these are relevant considerations, but they largely miss the point.