Nerd Deals:

Introducing the Grandstream UCM6100 Asterisk PBX: So Close But So Far Away

Introducing the Grandstream UCM6100 Asterisk PBX: So Close But So Far Away

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

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UPDATE: Here’s a newer Asterisk appliance for under $30. Grandstream has done with Asterisk what Samsung and others did with Android. You basically take a freely available, open source toolkit and transform it into a terrific piece of turnkey hardware with tremendous savings in development costs. While it’s great for consumers, to us it highlights what is wrong with the GPL2 license which lets companies do this in the first place. These for-profit companies give almost nothing back to the… Read More ›

Taking a Page from Asterisk: How Far We Have Come

Taking a Page from Asterisk: How Far We Have Come

Monday, July 22, 2013

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We’ve never written about paging technology before, and this is one of those areas of VoIP telephony where it certainly paid to wait. What a difference a few years makes! At least in the Asterisk® context, SIP-based paging traditionally involved issuing a Page command with a list of extensions in your dialplan. The wrinkle was that each VoIP phone manufacturer had its own SIP header to trigger autoanswer on its phones. And, without autoanswer, paging becomes next to worthless with… Read More ›

Programmer's Paradise: Introducing the VoIP Phone of the Year, Yealink's T46G

Programmer’s Paradise: Introducing the VoIP Phone of the Year, Yealink’s T46G

Monday, July 15, 2013

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If you’ve been missing the Aastra programming platform these last couple years while America’s patent trolls continued to destroy the software development community in the United States, then you’ll be excited to learn that there’s a new kid on the block with a revolutionary phone. One can’t help wondering what the heck we are doing to ourselves. First, we destroy the programming community with tax breaks for off-shore developers, and then we grant bogus software patents for "inventions" that have… Read More ›

The Future of VoIP Telephony in an Asterisk World

The Future of VoIP Telephony in an Asterisk World

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

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If you don’t think there’s a telephony revolution underway, then take a look at this year’s crop of new VoIP telephones. No doubt that Alexander Graham Bell would be a happy camper. We’ve picked three of our favorites to take for a spin this week. Pictured above (left to right) are the Mocet Communicator, Grandstream’s GXP2200, and Yealink’s T46G. These three devices offer three dramatically different, but equally effective, approaches to the future of VoIP telephony. The Mocet Communicator is… Read More ›

Triple Treat: Some Asterisk Utilities to Brighten Your Summer

Triple Treat: Some Asterisk Utilities to Brighten Your Summer

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

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[purehtml id=12] If you live and breathe Asterisk® but don’t visit the PIAF Forum regularly, you’re missing one of the best VoIP resources on the Internet. To get everyone in the Independence Day mood, we thought we’d share a few of the new goodies that have appeared on the PIAF Forum since The Great Crash of 2013. Although each of these utilities was designed to support PBX in a Flash™ and Incredible PBX™ systems, with a little tweaking, they’ll work… Read More ›

The 5-Minute PBX: Incredible PBX 11 and Incredible Fax Get a Facelift

The 5-Minute PBX: Incredible PBX 11 and Incredible Fax Get a Facelift

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

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With the release of PBX in a Flash™ 2.0.6.4.4 last week, it seemed only fitting to reintroduce our one-click wonder that takes advantage of the latest and greatest feature sets in both Asterisk® 11 and FreePBX® 2.11. Incredible PBX™ 11 gives you the best of all worlds plus all of the very best, preconfigured Asterisk applications we could find. And the installer together with all of the apps are pure open source so you can learn how to build a… Read More ›

Amerika the Beautiful: An Insider's View of What Went Wrong and How To Fix It

Amerika the Beautiful: An Insider’s View of What Went Wrong and How To Fix It

Monday, June 17, 2013

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UPDATE: Following a week of almost daily new disclosures, we are republishing our original article with some additional observations from us and others who have been following what will almost certainly turn out to be one of the most shocking and important revelations in the history of our republic. Much of this story has unfolded on Twitter, one of the few companies that stood up to the government and refused to participate in the PRISM data collection enterprise. So it… Read More ›

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: 2013 Cellphone Navigation Guide

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: 2013 Cellphone Navigation Guide

Thursday, June 6, 2013

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Every year or so we like to take a fresh look at the cell phone landscape and reassess what makes the most sense for business, personal, and family use in terms of cost, functionality, and performance. Last year’s favorite based upon both cost and feature set was StraightTalk which offered unlimited talk, text, and data (sort of) on either the AT&T or T-Mobile network for $45 a month. Since that article was released, StraightTalk has quietly dropped the AT&T offering… Read More ›