Asterisk has gotten a lot of press coverage lately. What's all the commotion about? Asterisk is a software-based solution that provides more features than many expensive commercial PBX systems. Best of all, it's free and works with dozens of standard IP telephones.

Out-of-the-box, Asterisk has business-grade voice mail, conferencing, ACD, Automated Attendant, IVR, music on hold, and Voice-over-IP. It connects to standard telephone lines, such as POTS and PRI, with additional hardware available from Digium. Digium is also the primary developer and sponsor of Asterisk.

I installed Asterisk on an 800MHz PC a little over a year ago and haven't looked back since. My wife no longer writes an $80 check every month to Verizon. Instead, we pay our Voice-over-IP carrier about $5 a month: about a penny a minute for US-based calls and $1 a month for our phone number. Since we don't need a pair of copper wires for every phone call, we can place and receive multiple calls simultaneously.

Callers to the house are greeted with a pleasant female auto-attendant that says, "Thank you for calling the Misel residence. To speak with Tiffany, press 1. For Steve, press 2." Asterisk routes the call to the appropriate extension. If the phone isn't answered in a few seconds, it bounces the caller to one of our cellular phones. If that goes unanswered, the caller gets routed back to Asterisk to leave a voice mail. Asterisk can send e-mail with the call information and attach the voice mail message as a WAV file for playback through a PC.

On our frequent trips to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, my wife and I bring an extension with us. Our camper has a Cisco 7960 IP phone and a wireless Ethernet bridge. This setup registers with the Asterisk server at home through the campground's wireless Internet and all of our calls automatically route there so we never miss a beat.

Recently, my in-laws came to visit from California. Since we don't have guests very often, I decided to wire the guest room television to the living room ReplayTV PVR, which is hooked up to a satellite receiver. This worked, but changing channels required a trip to the living room to use the infrared remote control. There were a few solutions - an additional satellite receiver for the guest room, a remote control "extender" or Asterisk.

Of course I chose the Asterisk route. In a matter of hours, I had an Asterisk application that duplicated all of the major features of the Replay remote and worked from any phone in the house. This application "lives" on extension 993 and is called like any other extension. After dialing 993, the user can input a channel directly or view and scroll through on-screen programming guides to find a program.

I've done other interesting things with Asterisk: It's hooked directly into the whole-house intercom system. One of my programs announces Caller ID information through the intercom when we get a call. Another program keeps an eye out for severe weather announcements from the National Weather Service and reads them over the intercom. I've also written a program that reads e-mail and RSS news over the phone.

For me, the real allure of Asterisk is doing things that wouldn't normally be possible with a regular phone. Of course, the $75-a-month savings over our old POTS line doesn't hurt, either. A small or medium-sized company could save several thousand dollars by deploying Asterisk instead of a proprietary PBX and could save money every month by using an IP-based carrier instead of a traditional phone company.

Over the next few months, we'll walk through the installation and configuration of Asterisk. You'll soon be a VOIP junkie like me.

References

• Digium: www.digium.com/
• Asterisk: www.asterisk.org/
• VoIP info: www.voip-info.org/