Meeting Notes January 11

Asterisk Utah Users Group Meeting
Presenter Jared Smith - Asterisk Evangelist/Hacker

* Business
1st Tuesday of every month.
SLC Public Library - provides free locations for holding meetings, not food allowed though, unless you put down a deposit and cleaning fee.
Dave Pacham in charge of a mailing list.

* Possible Future Meeting format
A 20 minute intro presentation
A 30 minute in depth presentation.

* Quick Ideas For Future Meetings
Echo debugging
Hardware/Gear review FXS, FXO, ATA's etc
Clustering/HA
VOIP Service Providers
Presence - Dave Pacham
AGI Programming
User interfaces/ web interfaces
GXP speaker functions don't work
- AstBill on Drupal
- PhoneCall on ??
Terminology

* What is wrong with Asterisk
- Config file channels - SIP channels and objects.
- Multi-tenanting
- call parking
- Dial plan
- Bluetooth channel
- Cheap ATA's
- DLink, IAX 1402s 2 vs 6 extensions, 8 port devices are needed
Voicemail interface is good, but needs some TLC work.
Voicemail is low hanging fruit.
Voicemail goals -
Under maintenance - listening to the current greeting.

* Presentation
Broadband makes Asterisk.
Business Applications, Apache, Linux have completely changed businesses.
End users understands Features per Price.
Asterisk is flexibility.
Try to set up hunt groups on a via.

Read Mark Spencer's Asterisk is everything presentation.
Telephony is suddenly something cool.
Linux telephony market in 10 years will be bigger than the Linux market.
Vonage does all it's voicemail through Asterisk.
Conference bridging - Asterisk is cool. It isn't perfect, but for the price you can't beat it.
Everyday it gets better with each CVS and SVN checkin.
15 - 20k subscriptions to the Asterisk mailing list.
IRC channel

Jared's Goals
1) To share knowledge. Knowledge doesn't do you any good unless you share it.
Sharing makes it stronger.
2) It is a place where we can all come and grow and learn.
3) Help make Asterisk better.

We want Asterisk to be as ubiquitous as Apache.

What can Asterisk do for me.
Asterisk is a platform, not a product.
Asterisk is a tool not a solution.
How do we use and sharpen that tool, to the point where we know how to use it effectively.
Good GUI's and documentation and even a O'Reilly book has appeared recently.
The initial learning curve isn't as
Asterisk is flexible if you need a feature
1 - Scratch your own itch.
2 - Convince a core developer that is his itch also.

What can we do as members of the Asterisk community.
Ask questions in a smart way.
Choose the right forum. Developers are not a proxy for Goggle. Go do your own homework first.
Be quick to say thank you and slow to express anger (flame).
Fill out good bugs reports, add detail and be precise.
Help testing.

Jared's story of how he became a Asterisk participant.
I got started with a single FXO card and a little USB FXS.
Three call centers
1.5 Mbit T1 line - 23 or 24 analog channels.
Only GSM codecs not G723 G729.
Send packets every 40ms instead of 20ms get up to 29-30 simultaneous calls.
3 to 4 10 hours day looking to increase simultaneous calls.
Plug all concurrent calls inside a single packet.
IAX Trunking.

Hence Jared learned how to work with user groups and developers.
The idea of opensource involvement and participation clicked.