Telephony Fraud – Still going strong

Who would believe, in the age of Skype, Whatsapp and Facebook – telephony fraud, one of the most lucrative and cleanest form of theft – is still going strong. Applications of the social nature are believed to be harming the world wide carrier market – and carrier are surely complaining to regulators – and for […]

Federating Asterisk – truth or myth?

During this years’ Asterisk Developers’ Conference, one of the subjects I’ve raised an issue for Asterisk is: “Federating Multiple Asterisk Instances”. Now, for the seasoned Asterisk user/developer, the answer would be simple – use Kamailio/OpenSIPS for that scalability, and use Asterisk as a Media Gateway or application server.

Astricon, Vegas and Geekness

So, Astricon 2014 is over and behind now and I’m now sitting at the Holiday Inn in Chicago. I have to admit that moving from the RedRock resort and Casino to the Holiday Inn in Chicago – talk about a mind blowing change. Just to give a general idea, the bath room in Vegas was roughly the size of the entire room here (mental note to self – next time order something better via BA miles).

The Asterisk scaleability Unicorn

Asterisk Scaleability is somewhat of a unicorn – not because it doesn’t exist, it is a little tricky to do and get it right first time.

Extreme Asterisk Cloud Performance – Part I

Here’s a challenging question for the Asterisk technical savvy of you… What is the top performance you can squeeze out of an Asterisk box, running on Amazon EC2 – or to that extent, a cloud infrastructure? If you scout the Internet, you may find various answers – however, most of them aren’t backed up by real numbers or real information,made accessible in a normal readable form.
Recently, we’ve become heavily involved in a project requiring massive usage of cloud based infrastructure. I won’t go into details as to what the project is or what we are doing, however, I felt that some interesting facts about Asterisk 11.0.1 and Cloud infrastructure can be shared with the rest of you.

Call Analytics – Beyond CDR analysis – Part I

“Oh, just get me the CDR’s and I’ll take it from there” – how many times have I heard these words before? I can’t even imagine the number of times in the past 15 years of IT/Telecom’s work that I’ve done and in the last 8 years of Asterisk in particular – when it comes to billing and fraud management, it would appear that the CDR’s are the Rosetta Stone of the industry.

Astricon 2009 – Glendale, AZ – Part I

Well, as some of you know, I’ll be speaking at this week’s AstriCon convention, being held in Glendale, AZ. I guess that in normal days I wouldn’t be starting to write about it prior to the actual convention, however, this time I decided to write about it earlier. I guess the title of this post can be changed to: Tosche Mark Spencer.

A baby, a house and a full time job

For those of you who know personally, you probably already know that last month I became a father. I guess the transition is something that I was more or less ready for, at least on the technical terms of the transition.

Asterisk and Amazon EC2 – Amoocon Presentation

I recently gave a presentation at the Amoocon convention, held in Rostock, Germany – about Asterisk and Amazon EC2. Below is a medium quality video of that presentation: or you may download it here: Amazon EC2 and Asterisk video files