Kevin Rose is joined by John Todd, a well known, leading Asterisk expert, to introduce you to the amazing VoIP (Voice over IP) world of Asterisk, the open source voip telephony toolkit. In this episode, Kevin and John take you through the installation and configuration of this powerful tool, and show how it can be used to give anyone complete control over their phone experiences, such as voice over wifi, eliminating phone costs, choosing from hundreds of VoIP providers, creating your own voicemail and menus, and numbers that follow you..just to scratch the surface.

Thought this was really fucking cool, especially when he brought out the portable house phone. It was essentially a cell phone with a wi-fi chip in it that searches for a network. When it finds one it contacts the Asterisk box at home and you calls can be made or taken through it. Then they mentioned that when Google's free wi-fi internet hits San Francisco, you could walk around with this phone and anywhere in the city people could call your home number and you could answer it wherever you were. Free cell phone.

http://revision3.com/systm/asterisk/media

6/16/2006 12:02:00 PM

There are several VOIP "cell" phones out, this isn't really all that new, and they dont work very well

but Asterisk looks like it could be pretty cool

[Edited on June 16, 2006 at 12:24 PM. Reason : .]

6/16/2006 12:19:33 PM

Asterisk is indeed pretty cool.

we've been working on using it to replace our current phone switches where i work.

Im actually writing a high level java-based manager for making and recieving calls programatically thru asterisk.

We used an asterisk switch and sip phones for a 5 week call center project we had Worked pretty damn good and was very quick to setup.

SIP is one of the easiest things to configure. You can have a base build of asterisk on a pc in 30 minutes and have 30 sip phones configured and talking.

If you really want to play around with Asterisk here is what i would suggest. Grab an old pc like a 1ghz pIII or smoething similar. Buy an x100p FXO card off ebay. An FXO card will let you terminate your house line at your asterisk box. You can then use your asterisk box as your phone. Its pretty damned cool. You could configure sip phones, setup voicemail, or if you want to be a dork create your own really cool IVR.

One thing thats worth mentioning is that Asterisk is what vonage uses for their servers. Its pretty hot stuff.

6/16/2006 12:30:28 PM