Opening of the conference
Olle E. Johansson, Edvina.net, organizer of Astricon

Conference keynote: Asterisk - the leading Open Source PBX today and in the future

Mark Spencer, CEO, Digium and creator of Asterisk

Mark Spencer is President and founder of Digium, formerly Linux Support Services, Inc., a Huntsville, AL based company focused on the development and support of low-cost, innovative telecommunications hardware and open source software. Mark, originally from Auburn, AL, graduated in 1999 from Auburn University with a BS in Computer Engineering and founded his company in 2000. Mr. Spencer is the original author of GAIM, the widely popular, multi-protocol instant messanging program for Linux, BSD, and Windows. Mark is also responsible for Asterisk, the Open Source PBX for Linux, BSD, and MacOS.

the fwdOUT architecture

fwdOUT(tm) is a non-commercial service that enables Asterisk(tm) System users to find one another and share their phone lines.
The service is completely Asterisk-based and allows users to place free calls nearly anywhere in the world as long as they let other users use their phone line. In this session, Ed will describe the central server's architecture in detail and discuss some of the tradeoffs that were made during the design and implementation.

Ed Guy

Ed is a seasoned Computer Systems Architect with broad experience in network-based, large-scale & highly available systems.
He is currently the founder of a nascent Internet communications startup. Previously, he was the Chief Scientist at pulver.com where he developed Blue Lava Software's Open Source collection, designed and implemented fwdOUT, and originally led the Free World Dialup team to deliver a system capable of supporting several hundred thousand subscribers. He also designed and deployed VoIP systems for major telephony carriers. Prior to that, he was Founder and CTO of EMC Software, a project consulting and software development firm, where he engineered cable and DSL-based VoIP Systems and softphones. Ed holds a doctoral degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Syracuse University where he performed distributed computing research.

Connecting 2 way radio systems using Asterisk

A short and to the point outline of 2 way radio systems, their purpose, and how they generally work followed by a general description of app_rpt and what it does, and how it does it, and mention of some other practical uses of it, and potentially other similar applications. Jim is the inventor of Zapata Telephony, or Zaptel, named after the Mexican guerilla leader Gen. Emiliano Zapata.

Jim Dixon - "Dude"

Jim is the inventor of the Zapata telephony cards and a Systems Engineer (consultant) with the main specialites in Telecom. He's been doing Engineering ever since Junior High school (although professionally since High school) and have been an Internet developer since 1980 (working on the Arpanet for MIT). He never bothered with college.

In addition Jim have been helping with the development of Asterisk during its lifetime. He has also created and been working on the app_rpt Asterisk 2 way radio project.

VoIP and Emergency Call handling

This talk covers the FCC's order, the history of the rule, the analysis of what it means to those using Asterisk and what steps need to be taken in order to comply. Jason will also examine some of the steps taken by Nuvio and other providers to try and meet the FCC order, as well as pending legal action being taken against the FCC order.

Jason Tally, Nuvio

Jason Talley is chief executive officer and co-founder of Nuvio Corporation, the leading provider of branded VoIP services for Cable MSOs, ISPs, VARs, CLECs, and other providers of telecom services . Mr. Talley brings extensive telecommunications and technology expertise to his position and is a frequent speaker at industry functions worldwide, regularly commenting on timely telecommunications and Internet issues such as taxation and FCC and state regulation of Internet telephony.

Mr. Talley received his Juris Doctor from the University of Missouri.

Running Asterisk outside of the USA - *I18N

Caleb Kow, co-founder, CTO, Value Communications

Caleb is CTO of Singapore headquartered VoIP Consultancy Value Communications Pte Ltd. He has been involved in the Internet networking industry since 1997 and is a non-executive director on the board of companies in the education, corporate training, events management and innovation circles which are controlled through his private investment vehicle.

In recent months, Caleb has led successful VoIP project implementations for corporate MNCs and service providers in the Asia-Pacific region and is an active proponent of utilising VoIP technologies within corporate setups.

Dundi - extending dynamic Asterisk dial plans across Internet and avoiding VoIP spam

Russell Bryant, Asterisk.org

Russell Bryant is currently a Junior studying undergraduate Computer Engineering at Clemson University in Clemson, South Carolina. He got his start in telecom at the beginning of 2004 by working as a co-op engineer at ADTRAN, a telecom equipment supplier in Huntsville, AL. He has since been hired as a part-time software developer for Digium.

Russell has been involved in various aspects of Asterisk development since the middle of 2004. Along with his work on the development branch of Asterisk, he has been maintaining the 1.0 release branch of Asterisk since its release a year ago.

Towards A Scalable Application Framework for Asterisk with AstManProxy

You've got some Linux boxes running Asterisk, Apache, perl, php, MySQL, and a variety of other good tools. It's a natural enough idea to try to interface Asterisk with your web applications, but when it comes to actually doing it, myriad challenges become apparent.

What's a good way to interface between a web app and the manager API? Should you use a manager proxy? What about XML-RPC or SOAP options? How do you get back synchronous results? How do you tie Asterisk information back to web session state? Should I use AGI, Manager, or CLI?

We'll look at some answers to these questions as well as trade stories about how different people have solved these very challenging problems, and take a look at some actual web-based applications that utilize Asterisk in creative and powerful ways.

David C. Troy, President/CEO, popvox, LLC

David Troy is a technology entrepreneur. He founded a worldwide mail order/retail computer sales outlet at age 14 in 1986, and transitioned into the Internet Service Provider market in 1995. In 1995, he founded ToadNet, a prominent ISP in the mid-Atlantic area. He was also an initial investor in Core Communications, a profitable CLEC (Competitive Local Exchange Carrier) based in Annapolis, Maryland. In 2004, he sold ToadNet to Landmark Communications (parent company of the Weather Channel, Trader Publications, and several other media properties) in an all-cash deal.

David now has two years of experience coding with the Asterisk platform. He contributed several feature enhancements to Asterisk's app_queue Queueing application (hold time estimation and announcements and call queue position to name two), and has also contributed several helper scripts that are now in CVS, including "qview.pl" and "simpleproxy.pl". He lives in Annapolis, Maryland with his wife and two children, and is currently the Founder and CEO of Popvox, LLC, an IP Voice Application Service Provider.

Using Open Standards to Implement Highly Available Asterisk

• What is available today for building clustered solutions? (CDRs and SIP registry is protected)
• What could be done if Asrterisk included SAF Cluster APIs (Call state protected across nodes)
• Describe an IBM proof of concept demo, where Asterisk was modified to use SAF cluster APIs and produce a Highly Available IP-PBX.

Jay D. Allen, IBM

Jay works with IBM partners in the telecommunications industry. He has held various roles in the industry including operations management, systems integration/consulting and business development. His focus at IBM is on Telecom standards, especially in the area of Next Generation Networks and Voice Over IP. Jay represents IBM at the Service Availability Forum (SAF) and participates in the Carrier Grade Linux (CGL) initiative.

The Asterisk Documentation Project - where did it go?

One year ago at Astricon 2004, Leif and Jared asked for help with the documentation project, talking about their dream to publish an Asterisk book. What really happened? This year, they're three representatives of Asteriskdocs.org telling you the latest news...

Jared Smith, Leif Madsen, Jim van Meggelen, Asteriskdocs.org

Running Asterisk in a Corporate environment: a beginners tale.

This talk describes our experiences setting up an Asterisk system in the midst of, and interfacing to, the existing corporate telephone system. We will cronicle our (mis)adventures that include: dealing with broken dhcp servers, connecting T1's to legacy PBX's, finally understanding Asterisk contexts, and providing VOIP phone services to employees' home offices, while negotiating corporate firewalls and security checkpoints.

Stephen Uhler, Sr. Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems

Stephen Uhler is the Principal Investigator of the Enterprise PDA project. Before Enterprise PDA, Uhler was the PI for the Brazil project, which included an experimental web application development environment ideal for web-enabling devices, aggregating content from other web applications, and building personal web portals that filter and modify aggregated content.

Prior to that, Uhler was the creator of the reverse-proxy, a key component of the sun.net product, the architect and designer of the supplier.net secure supply chain integration system, and a member of the SunLabs TCL project, where he pioneered the TCL embedded web server technology.

Asterisk and The Open Source Revolution

An incredible revolution is under way. It has been a long time in coming, but now that it has started, there will be no stopping it. It is taking place in an area of technology that has lapsed embarrassingly far behind every other industry that calls itself high-tech.
The industry is telecommunications, and the revolution is being fueled by an open source Private Branch eXchange (PBX) called Asterisk.
Telecommunications is arguably the last major electronics industry that has (until now) remained untouched by the open source revolution. Major telecommunications manufacturers still build ridiculously expensive, incompatible systems, running complicated, ancient code on impressively engineered yet obsolete hardware.

Jim van Meggelen, Core Telecom Innovations

Jim Van Meggelen is President and CTO of Core Telecom Innovations, a Canadian-based provider of open-source telephony solutions. He has over fifteen years of enterprise telecom experience, for such companies as Nortel, Williams and Telus, and has has extensive knowledge of both legacy and VoIP equipment from manufacturers such as Nortel, Cisco and Avaya.
  Jim is one of the principal contributors to the Asterisk Documentation Project, and is co-authoring the upcoming O'Reilly book, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony. He enjoys teaching, public speaking, improvisational acting, and writing.

Summary, Q/A

Olle E. Johansson, Edvina.net & Steven M. Sokol, Sokol & Associates LLC
- The Astricon Organizers!

Asterisk Product Raffle