I went to Astricon last week and a few quick thoughts to share.
Asterisk is now 10 years old and this is the 6th Astricon Conference and the largest in attendance so far. The show is very casual and very friendly. If you don’t already know Astricon is Digium’s technical conference – very technical. Everyone is approachable and held together by a common bond. At most telecom conferences I feel a lot more technical than most attendees – not here.
The highlights of the conference were as follows:
- IAX is to be correctly referred to as “eeks” not “I-A-X”.
- Asterisk has now moved into the mainstream due to a blessing by IBM. IBM is selling Asterisk based solutions within its massive product portfolio.
- Google was there pushing the code.google.com website and stating their support of open source software. They do not run Asterisk internally but are happy that it supports Google talk.
- Polycom is coming out with a video phone that will work with Asterisk “someday” but right now currently does not.
- Cisco has released a bunch of new phones, SIP Nat devices, and IAD devices geared toward Asterisk ITSPs.
- Aastra gave us a new phone to demo…
- A project called openBTS has paved the way for Asterisk to work with GSM mobile handsets. They did a field test at the Burning Man festival in Nevada which was by far the most interesting presentation for someone like me.
- A Malaysian company called Intuit Innovations created a scalable solution able to support 130,000 existing subscribers and handle 10,000 concurrent calls for the U.S. Army in Baghdad, Iraq.
- The city of Taguig, Philippines implemented a unified citywide telecommunications system. Serving 73 sites. The implementation has already brought a 50% decrease in city costs while doubling city workers’ productivity.
All in all the sessions were all very good and a lot of good knowledge was spread. I’ll defiantly be returning next year. I just have to work on my Foosball skills first.
