Telephone Systems

Voice over IP (VoIP) technology uses data networks and the Internet to carry telephone traffic, rather than dedicated telephony cabling. This offers enormous benefits, with possibly the greatest being free calls over Internet links but also gives incredible flexibility.

Asterisk

There are many excellent commercially available VoIP systems, but they can be expensive and daunting. Asterisk by Digium is an extremely powerful telephony system available under the classic open source model - free if you want to run it yourself or pay for services if that suits you better.

Asterisk can be as simple or as complicated as you need it to be. There are various packages designed to get you up and running as quickly as possible - Trixbox from Fonality gives you a bootable CD that will walk you through an install of Asterisk and includes great features out of the box like call logging and reporting, customer relationship management (CRM) software as well as all the business class features you'd expect like voicemail, call queueing and conferencing.

Scalability

For the small business a great advantage of using Asterisk is its scalibility. You can start off small - you might have two extensions sharing one phone line - and grow the system when you need to by adding extra phone lines and extensions. Unlike commercial systems, you don't have to pay a licence fee when you add an extension.

If you have multiple sites with internet connections you can set youself up for free calls between offices, and you can even take your office extension home with you! You can connect up to a VoIP service provider and get cheap calls and buy ranges of DDI numbers or 0845/0800 numbers.

More Info

Trixbox Without Tears is probably the definitive guide to setting up Trixbox/Asterisk and explains things far better than we could here...!