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Comment by smhinsey | Hacker News Reader

This seems like as good a place as any to ask: I work at a company that's distributed all across the US and East Asia. We don't really have a coherent phone system. This isn't my area per se, but I'm curious to see what options are out there. What should I look at? Is Skype the way to go or are there better "corporate" options?

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Our small company linked free open source Asterisk servers in US, Philippines, and India (10-100 people per location). It's doable, but has a significant learning curve. I'd recommend hiring a professional to help you set it up and train your IT staff.

If you want to pay for a higher end option, Avaya is a common choice. They power many companies (including huge call centers) all over the world.

If you have moderate experience with Linux and can read manpages then you should have no real problem linking Asterisk servers between locations and setting up all common phone functions.

Asterisk (and its derivatives) are really quite powerful and easy to use. We use it everywhere that the commercial systems fail (like having working SIP without paying tens of thousands in licenses)

I have worked with Asterisk and would recommend using FreeSWITCH instead.

I would not. Not yet, anyway. Configuration of Asterisk is significantly easier with the FreePBX GUI. The FreeSWITCH equivalent is 2600hz which, although prettier, is missing a number of features* and is more difficult to use in some ways.

It's very promising, though.

* I don't remember which features specifically, but I do remember being unable to completely replicate a moderately complex Asterisk setup in the 2600hz GUI. It might have been related to the AVR system.

Hi - founder of blue.box, the product from 2600hz you are referring to.

I'd be curious to know which features, but more importantly, have you seen Whistle? It's an API-driven control system for clustered FreeSWITCH. You can probably do whatever you need to in there.

What kind of hardware to you use (besides the boxes themselves)? Is everything a VOIP phone with an RJ-45 jack, or do you also use add-on cards and other telephony goodies?

If you want POTS, you get a telephony card from Digium. If all you want is VOIP, then you can use your box as-is.

Might be outdated, but you TFoT2 is free:

http://astbook.asteriskdocs.org/

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