Asterisk got its start when Mark Spencer needed a phone system for his company and the cheapest system available on the market was way too expensive. Already skilled in programming and application development, Mark created his own phone system that has now become the standard open source PBX that is being used at places like the city of Madera, California.

Cost savings are significant as there are no licensing fees with Asterisk, the city of Madera budgeted $400,000 for the phone system and ended spending only $140,000.

Asterisk runs on a variety of OS’s including, Linux, Solaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Protocols supported are SIP, Inter-Asterisk Exchange (for authentication), Media Gateway Control and H.323.

If supporting open source software is not a risk you are willing to take, there are many vendors providing custom flavors of Asterisk with extensive support options like Aspect Software, CyberData, Escaux, Fonality, LumenVox and SimpleSignal.

The list of hardware supported on Asterisk keeps growing and there is no shortage of low cost FXS, FXO, PRI and other such ports, along with being successfully used with SIPConnect interface with a variety of dialtone providers.