Asterisk IP PBX Learning Tutorials - Part 1
Back my popular demand, the 10 part series on how to use Asterisk. Some of you have asked for the transcripts in addition to the videos. So, here ya go:
What is VoIP, asterisk and other strange words:
Welcome to the Asterisk video tutorials, in these videos you will learn what is asterisk how to install and manage it.
But lets start with the beginning, we all hear a lot now about things like VoIP, cheap calls or even free calls. So what’s that all buzz around?
What is VoIP? It stands for voice over ip. What is voice over ip then? It is technology that allows transfer of voice over ip network, and ip network is what we all call internet. But why it is so cheap and even sometimes free? Because there is already a huge infrastructure for internet that is capable of carrying a huge amount of data between different locations and it is capable of carrying an enormous amount of concurrent calls. In traditional telephone network, when you place a call, you occupy a phone line, and nobody else is not able to use it until you put your phone on hook. In internet, the same single line can carry a lot of concurrent calls in addition to data it is carrying already. This is why it is cheap, you share the same resource with many others and thus sharing your bill for the line that you occupy.
VoIP is a set of protocols or rules that are used by different devices to communicate with each other and transfer your and your opponent’s voices between themselves. Some of the examples of VoIP protocols are SIP, session initiation protocol, IAX that’s inter asterisk exchange protocol and many others. The transcoded voice goes in RTP which real time transport protocol, I guess the name stands for itself.
OK, then what is asterisk? Asterisk is a software that runs on linux and speaks all those protocols. So why all the internet speaks about it? Weren’t there software and hardware that were able to do such things, you might ask. Yes, but asterisk is free and open source, you can get it for absolutely no charge and use it in any way you would like to. And it is very easy to manage it, everybody can get a copy and start using advanced telecom features like voicemail, call waiting etc for absolutely free.
Isn’t it fascinating? Lets start our journey in the world of asterisk!
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