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.

Updates, Astricon, Allo.com and more

So, let’s talk PRI cards. Once every often a company approaches me to evaluate their products. I do my best to be as impartial as I can – after all, Digium products are my favorite. However, I’m always happy to see a product that can compete nicely with Digium, simply because I believe it will make Digium products better and stronger. So, a couple of months ago, Allo.com approached me to evaluate their PRI card. I agreed, and they’ve sent me their PCI-e version of a quad span E1/T1 card.

Business 2.0 – Taking the leap forward…

The following post doesn’t really fit in line with the normal spirit of the blog, simply because it’s not funny nor directly related to technology. It’s called Business 2.0, as it relates to the ever problematic question any business owner has: “When should I grow and how?”.

Asterisk, Greed and Revenue Shares

Revenue sharing is one of the oldest methods of earning profits, actually, I believe it may just be right up there with trading of goods and food.

Beyond the dialtone – PBX user experience revisited

When most of us think about PBX systems, we usually associate these with cumbersome usage, confusing dialing codes and in most cases – a PBX system is automatically associated with the annoying task of transferring a call from one handset to another. Lately, I’ve been thinking deeply about how people use PBX systems, is this really the only way to use a PBX system? is there something else to the mix? can we really enrich one of the oldest operational paradigms in the world? – and for that matter, can the public be re-educated to assimilate a new breed of PBX systems or services?

I’m not rude, I’m eccentric

Today I got the chance to speak at a Polycom half-day convention, mainly to speak about Asterisk and HDvoice. Now, putting aside the part about HDvoice (I’m getting a post about that on its own), I gotten to the point where I believe that I’m currently perceived as being an eccentric.

Asterisk Fax, Cheap VoIP Providers, Free Calls and more …

As I recently explained to a good friend of mine, the essence of Jewish holidays is, more or less, the ever growing consumption of food – due to our great fortune with people trying to kill us and not being able to do so. Putting that aside, now a days, the essence of Jewish holidays, at least in Israel, is to basically sit at home and do nothing.

Hijacked by RTFM to la-la land

I keep a vigilant eye on Google Alerts. To be more exact, I’ve got a few alerts defined, in accordance to subjects that interest me. Two of these subjects are Asterisk and FreeSwitch. Recently, the following had been posted on a personal blog: Chose Freeswitch over Asterisk October 28, 2008 – 12:09 am Posted in Uncategorized […]

TrixBox shows its support (or lack of it)

Well, it’s quite common to get a flame here and there on any Internet technical maling list, but the following really caught my eye. Here’s an extract from the TrixBox forum: ———————- CUT HERE ———————- Subject: SS7 on Sangoma a101D shoieb_arshad Submitted by shoieb_arshad on Sat, 09/20/2008 – 12:16am. hello i have a two running […]

Dialers – Myth or Truth?

Over the past 12 months, I’ve been heavily involved in the development of high-speed dialers. While many companies published a prolific number of automatic dialers (power, predictive, broadcast) – none of these companies ever announced there top speed dialing capability. An so I ask myself: “What is the reason not to release these numbers publicly?” […]