Hi all, pls i thought of inplementing voIP using asterisk @ school as a final year project but i got stuck when a lecturer asked me why i would want to do that when there are software like skype. i need to know the advantages implementing asterisk has over such software and how i can package it as a project. Pleaseeeeeeee i NEED TO KNOW
They’re very different products…
Asterisk is a commercial-quality PBX solution (imho, on par with solutions from Avaya and Mitel), very powerful and customisable and supports open standards and hardware phones ( no, the USB Skype ones don’t count 
)
I know a lot of businesses using asterisk that wouldn’t dream of having a software application instead of a physical phone … it’s not the only difference between them - but it’s quite a major one for a commercial implication…
Asterisk supports standard protocols like sip, Skype uses a proprietary protocol; you can look in the Asterisk source code, learn a lot from it and modify it, Skype source code isn’t open.
Regards.
Marco Bruni
[quote=“rossmck”]They’re very different products…
[/quote]
Not even. Asterisk is a product. Skype is a service.
What the OP is doing is equivalent to comparing Asterisk with AT&T.
-Ramon