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Asterisk 17

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Re: Asterisk 17

#21
post #17

Like many of the commenters I heavily used asterisk 10 years ago. Seeing comments like “can’t believe it’s still around” leads me to believe something better came along. Did something better come along? I’d like to play around with something new. Ps - still running my home PBX on Asterisk/FreePBX.

Phones have evolved to the point where we no longer have to make phone calls, we can instead use them to send tiny letters to each other.

Nobody I know, and maybe this is self-selection, likes making phone calls. Nobody I know likes receiving phone calls. In fact, at home I never even though about hooking up a phone when I moved 5 years ago. At work, when we moved offices 3 years ago, we never even hooked up the PBX.

The number one voice use I have for my cell phone is the kids' school: 3-4 times a week, one of their computers calls and usually leaves me a voicemail, which Google (badly, but good enough) translates to text. In short: They are sending me voice SMSes. :-)

I loved Asterisk 20 years ago. It was insanely cool stuff. But I mostly live in a different world now.

Re: Asterisk 17

#23
post #17

Like many of the commenters I heavily used asterisk 10 years ago. Seeing comments like “can’t believe it’s still around” leads me to believe something better came along. Did something better come along? I’d like to play around with something new. Ps - still running my home PBX on Asterisk/FreePBX.

Asterisk is still cool. I think a lot of people are now using FreeSWITCH. I have more experience with the former but using the latter more lately I am seeing the appeal. FreeSWITCH seems a little less hacked together, imho.

Yah, I think this is the right answer. FreeSwitch is a great deal newer than asterisk and has a more logical configuration system imho. The big one is FusionPBX which is web based and runs on top of FreeSwitch - I suspect this is the main driver for do it yourself deployments these days.

Re: Asterisk 17

#24
I never did it, but many years ago had an idea to run an Asterix box with extensions for everyone in the extended family, spread over cities/countries.

Not sure how easy/practical it is/was, but always thought it'd be a good experiment.

I wonder if anyone ever did something similar.

Re: Asterisk 17

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asterisk is still cool. I think a lot of people are now using FreeSWITCH. I have more experience with the former but using the latter more lately I am seeing the appeal. FreeSWITCH seems a little less hacked together, imho.

Yah, I think this is the right answer. FreeSwitch is a great deal newer than asterisk and has a more logical configuration system imho. The big one is FusionPBX which is web based and runs on top of FreeSwitch - I suspect this is the main driver for do it yourself deployments these days.

I haven't used FreeSwitch and wanted to see a brief comparison between it and Asterisk. Here's what I found for those interested https://www.whichvoip.com/articles/freeswitch-vs-asterisk.ht...

Re: Asterisk 17

#26
post #24

I never did it, but many years ago had an idea to run an Asterix box with extensions for everyone in the extended family, spread over cities/countries. Not sure how easy/practical it is/was, but always thought it'd be a good experiment. I wonder if anyone ever did something similar.

It wouldn't be extremely difficult to configure, but I think security would be a hassle.

Re: Asterisk 17

#27

It's funny to me to see "was cool" and "amazing this is still alive", because I absolutely love Asterisk. I cut my teeth building Freepbx boxes at a small/mid business voip provider in college before moving on to a different field. To give an idea why I think it is so cool, my podcast offers neat things to folks who call in to leave a voicemail. You can listen to entire podcast episodes, explore a crude phone sound "…

I use Asterisk to tie a bunch of my shit together. I even have little burner phones that can do all sorts of cool things thanks to modern SIMs and VoIP tech.

What's your podcast? I'll bookmark it for later.

Re: Asterisk 17

#28
post #17

Like many of the commenters I heavily used asterisk 10 years ago. Seeing comments like “can’t believe it’s still around” leads me to believe something better came along. Did something better come along? I’d like to play around with something new. Ps - still running my home PBX on Asterisk/FreePBX.

Phones have evolved to the point where we no longer have to make phone calls, we can instead use them to send tiny letters to each other. Nobody I know, and maybe this is self-selection, likes making phone calls. Nobody I know likes receiving phone calls. In fact, at home I never even though about hooking up a phone when I moved 5 years ago. At work, when we moved offices 3 years ago, we never even hooked up the PBX.…

I think this is definitely a bit of self-selection.

I find phone calls are still better for conducting complex business - not everything can (or should) be scripted using a form, and a phone call sometimes is much more efficient than chat or email.

Video chat would be even better in some cases, but there's no standardized infrastructure for this. And even then, outside a corporate environment that has dedicated video conferencing rooms on both ends of the call, a phone call is often simpler.

Re: Asterisk 17

#29
post #17

Like many of the commenters I heavily used asterisk 10 years ago. Seeing comments like “can’t believe it’s still around” leads me to believe something better came along. Did something better come along? I’d like to play around with something new. Ps - still running my home PBX on Asterisk/FreePBX.

I read those comments as, "the longevity of this project is amazing!" and not "I can't believe people are still using this instead of X, Y, or Z."

Less people, I think, use Asterix directly these days simply because SaaS/PaaS offerings like Twilio (which is probably built on Asterix, for all I know) cover a lot of use cases. But that's only a guess!

Re: Asterisk 17

#30
post #27

It's funny to me to see "was cool" and "amazing this is still alive", because I absolutely love Asterisk. I cut my teeth building Freepbx boxes at a small/mid business voip provider in college before moving on to a different field. To give an idea why I think it is so cool, my podcast offers neat things to folks who call in to leave a voicemail. You can listen to entire podcast episodes, explore a crude phone sound "…

I use Asterisk to tie a bunch of my shit together. I even have little burner phones that can do all sorts of cool things thanks to modern SIMs and VoIP tech. What's your podcast? I'll bookmark it for later.

That's awesome. I've been toying with the idea of setting up things like that. My next little project is setting up sms support so folks can text in.

My podcast is Accidentally Fasting. Again, not related to tech at all, but I get to play around with this stuff since it's such an open format. Thanks for checking us out!

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/accidentally-fasting/i... https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/accidentally-fasting

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