Use of Open Source VoIP Rising

March 22, 2007: Many businesses are discovering the benefits of VoIP, and thanks to prominent proprietary services such as Skype winning over the market, open source alternatives such as AsteriskNOW are finding space to flourish.

Digium, the company behind AsteriskNOW, has just released beta five of the OS VoIP software and claims that it is currently being downloaded more than 2,000 times a day. Beta five is the last version before the full release, and due to this it includes a range of new features to not only make it more user friendly, but more powerful and easier to deploy.

The company claims that customers can now deploy AsteriskNOW in minutes with the bundled setup wizard. Once set up, it features a number of new goodies normally found only in proprietary systems, including the ability to manage multiple dial plans to tailor telephony to different groups, new direct inward dial features and browser integration for Internet Explorer 6, 7 and Firefox.

Digium has also included a customized Linux distribution and the AsteriskGUI graphical user interface and new hold music features that enable different recorded messages set for each caller queue.

“Our objective with AsteriskNOW is to bring the power and flexibility of Asterisk to a far broader group of customers,” said Mark Spencer, creator of Asterisk and founder and chief technology officer of Digium. “Companies that want a real alternative to phone systems that cost thousands of dollars can download and use AsteriskNOW—without any knowledge of Linux or programming skills.”

AsteriskNOW has also had its base of Certified Service Providers expanded to include IAXtel, New Global Telecom, Simple Signal, VoicePulse and Voilà IP.

Beta 5 will be generally available for free download from Friday, March 23 on the AsteriskNOW website.

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