Asterix conferencing call potential

I’m trying to assess the competitive threat that Asterix might represent to conventional corporate conference call services. To the extent any one has any views on Asterix’s conferencing abilities versus traditional hardware based conferencing bridges or more general thoughts on the potential ability for an all VoIP, software based conferencing service to displace traditional conference calls it would be very helpful.

My initially research suggests that it is unlikely that corporate conference callers transition to VoIP conference calls on a software bridge in the shorter because of the a) lack of security b) inconsistent quality of the calls and c) the limited amount of options available on the bridges (i.e. call management abilities, etc).

Any and all thoughts would be helpful and interesting.

it took about 15 minutes to for us to pull the plug on our old conferencing solution

you mentioned :
[size=75]My initially research suggests that it is unlikely that corporate conference callers transition to VoIP conference calls on a software bridge in the shorter because of the a) lack of security b) inconsistent quality of the calls and c) the limited amount of options available on the bridges (i.e. call management abilities, etc). [/size]

a) its as secure as you make it - what we have been able to do with asterisk is leaps and bounds ahead of where we were from a security perspective

b) again , its as good as the people who set it up … we have no issues with voice quailty - we are running a dell 2650 with a te411p ( i think thats the right model ) with 3 t1’s currently … one ties to the legacy definity ,another is a local PRI , and the third is a long distance circuit … we will be filling the last port with a link to another box to offload some processing; along with that we have taken the steps to insure voice quaility on the lan with QOS and a VLAN ( 802.11q tagging )

c) and finally i dont know who you sampled before but we have had the exact opposite experience

I have to echo the previous poster

Yes VoIP can have quality problem Especially when dealing with the internet, but in most cases this can be compensated for with QoS (what happens in the wild tho is beyond anyones control)

As the PSTN continues to convert to IP based networks (which is well underway especially on long haul) we will see that QoS get better.

In the interum, using the proper connection technologies with a little software expertise and the strengths of asterisk you can built a very robust, secure, and reliable conferencing server that can scale quite well.

If you are wondering is “Corporate America” dpeloying this technology? Fortune 100 probably not they like the status quo. SME markets are definatly deploying Asterisk for this. Dollar for Dollar/Euro for Euro, Cost and maintenance alone make asterisk a pretty sane solution.