IT Infusion Inc.

Is your Calgary based business looking for a reliable, affordable, and fully featured phone system that can be customized to meet your needs?

Did you you realize that an Asterisk IP PBX Linux based phone system matches up very favourably with commercial PBX systems that cost orders of magnitude more money to implement?

You can very easily implement a 20 workstation Asterisk based solution for under $5000 in hardware costs and no ongoing licensing fees. Try that with any of the major IP PBX vendors!

I’ve been running Asterisk servers for several years for my companies and for clients. Give me a call and we can talk about a solution for your company that could save you a lot of money on your communication costs!

Link2VoIP : VoIP / SIP / SIP Trunking / Asterisk Service Provider

I’ve been a Link2Voip customer for a couple of years now and I’m really happy with their services. They have been very reliable and the customer service is excellent. I have super low latency to their SIP servers in Edmonton (< 15ms) and their service is very affordable. I highly recommend them if you're looking for a company to provide VOIP access to the PSTN from your Asterisk box.

They've just come out with a new service that is pretty cool. You call a special phone number that always rings busy (so there is no connection and the call costs nothing). After you hang up, you get a call back from Link2Voip in about 5 seconds. When you answer you get dial tone. Now make your call. You still have your normal cell air time charges, but as far as the cell company is concerned it is a normal inbound call and is charged at normal air time rates. The cost to you is $0.011/minute on your Link2Voip account.

I bet that is a lot cheaper than you're currently paying for long distance on your cell?

I’m putting an Asterisk server in co-location and I’m trying to decide whether I should go with FreeBSD 7.0 or Debian Linux as the OS (sorry – I’m not a CentOS guy – just personal preference). My current Asterisk box is running Debian Etch and has been very stable. However, I would really prefer to run FreeBSD on a box that is going to be in co-lo several hundred kilometers away.

Does anybody have any experience with running Asterisk under FreeBSD? I’ve Googled around a bit and there isn’t a lot out there. Kind of funny because it appears that Asterisk in the FreeBSD ports collection stays pretty current. I don’t need to worry about PCI cards as all the voice trunks will be SIP. Any problems getting g729 running under FreeBSD?

For those of you who aren’t yet in the know:

“Asterisk is the most popular and extensible open source telephone system in the world, offering flexibility, functionality and features not available in advanced, high-end (high-cost) proprietary business systems. Asterisk is a complete IP PBX for businesses, and can be downloaded for free.” – www.asterisk.org

I’ve installed Asterisk several times and used it off and on for over a year now. I have to say that it is probably the coolest, most fun to play with, open source project that I’ve come across in all my years. I can’t believe how powerful, functional, easy to configure (with a little help from FreePBX) and stable this software is. The fact that Asterisk is free boggles the mind.

I’ve recently switched all my business voice communications to an Asterisk server and I’m not looking back. I’ve got follow-me ring groups, IVR menus, voicemail, callback dial tone, and SUPER cheap long distance for a mere fraction of what it would cost through Telus. Even though I’m using less than 10% of Asterisk’s extensive features, it is going to save me a bunch of money and make my communications much easier to manage.

Check out the list of features! Can your phone system do all this stuff? How much are you paying the phone company for all of your fancy calling features that could be handled by a free.

I have a client who is switching to Asterisk and he estimates it is going to cut his phone bills (which are over $2000/month) by more than half.

If you’re looking to add calling features while watching the bottom line, you owe it to yourself to look at Asterisk a bit closer.

Please Note: This is up for historical purposes and is getting pretty dated. I’ve since upgraded to Asterisk 1.4.13 w/ FreePBX and, while it is a similar install, I think that it’s probably actually easier. I didn’t use it, but this guide for installing version 1.4 on Etch is probably a good place to start…

Some changes in my business have meant that I finally have a business case for running my business (and home) phone lines through the open source Asterisk PBX. For those who aren’t familiar, Asterisk is a very powerful VOIP (Voice Over IP) enterprise phone system that runs on Linux and Unix servers. It provides all the features of proprietary PBX phone systems at a mere fraction of the cost. The software itself is free and it runs on commodity server hardware. The savings are really quite significant.

I installed a fresh Debian Etch stable server and then went to work on compiling Asterisk. Why not just install the Debian packages? Well, even the unstable packages aren’t that current and Asterisk changes fairly frequently. Compiling is the best way to stay current. A lot of Debian folks don’t want to stray too far from “apt-get” but it really isn’t that hard to compile Asterisk once you’ve done it a few times!
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