Panoramisk / The VoIP druid 

We have talked some weeks ago about the new Asterisk site called AstPligg (in our French edition), where people can share and vote on Asterisk related article. Back from vacation, we were surprised by the fact one of our article was on Astpligg. The article is about Asterisk redundancy with a very straightforward approach: “Asterisk redundancy, a very simple approach” (also available in French).

Thanks a lot to Astpligg readers who have voted this article (gamma, ragno, lenz, pedroso), we consider this as a good point and this gives us energy to continue our adventure of providing our readers with information and tips on voice over IP and the Asterisk solution.

Transporting voice over a packet network is not an easy task and requires controlled quality with regards to bandwidth first but also with delay, jitter and frame loss ratio. We can encounter a very bad voice quality during network congestion, which is not good for a professional network. In order to test our network in advance or during production there are tools and techniques that can be easily used. This article shows how to simply test an IP network for voice transport with off the shelf tools.
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One of the interests of IP telephony is the fact the Internet can become a network to carry telephony for some usages. We cannot consider today this network is offering a high grade quality but its ubiquity is incredible and no telco can nowadays be compared on this topic. It becomes relatively easy to imagine using a foreign ToIP operator in order to access specific prices in this country on one hand and be able to accept calls with a local number on the other hand.
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As soon as we install in an organisation an Asterisk IP telephony service, it can impact directly on the service and we should study how it can be resilient. This article proposes a very simple but redundant telephony service with two Asterisk servers installed in a load-balancing mode.
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IP telephony is a very exciting area for many people nowadays; even if it is really old from a technology standpoint. Protocols and technology are ready for long now but the market wasn’t according too much caution to this solution to transport voice over data network. Vendors have finally adopted the IP technology and are now pushing organizations and telcos to move to integrated service over IP networks. Taking advantage of the normal replacement of equipment bought during the pre 2000 period, moving to an IP solution is really something we can talk about.

Either you already have a functional telephony installation or you think about installing a new one, some questions needs to be answered or at least asked prior jumping in the deep ocean.

The purpose of this article is to put 12 questions that may help you for your next installation, keep these in mind when talking to your vendor or integrator.
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