Since the past decade VoIP is making telecommunications cheaper and affordable. In this presentation I have shared some basic concepts of VoIP and Asterisk, the world's best Open Source Software PBX

1. IP Telephony
KAUSHAL BHAVSAR, PRATIKĀR TECHNOLOGIES

2. Who am I?
Tech Geek Entrepreneur Inventor
Mentor Activist Human

3. What is IP Telephony?
TELEPHONY OVER INTERNET PROTOCOL, THAT IS!

4. Some background
L E T ’ S C L EA R S OME BA S I C CO N C E PTS F I RST

6. PSTN – Public Switched Telephony Network
PSTN Line

7. Enterprise Telephony
PSTN Line PBX

8. PBX – Private Branch Exchange
ALLOWS YOU TO HAVE YOUR OWN VIRTUAL PSTN

9. 1995 - VoIP
VOICE OVER INTERNET PROTOCOL BY VOCALTECH

10. Why VoIP?
Can add
features easily
Software
based
Optimum
Bandwidth
use
Mobility ….

11. What is VoIP?
Internet-based communication based on a
Virtual PSTN
Not just limited to voice!
◦ Video
◦ Audio
◦ Fax
◦ Text/SMS
VoIP is an important subset of Internet
Telephony

12. How to VoIP?
It’s very simple (in terms of hardware) to setup
VoIP.
You need:
◦ Internet
◦ (Old) Computer
◦ IP Phones (or computers with headphones)

13. But why use VoIP?
Organizations can benefit greatly. Some killing features
are:
◦ Interactive Voice Response System (IVRS)
◦ Automated Call Distribution (ACD)
◦ Predictive Call Dialling
◦ Automated Call Dialling
◦ Answering Machine Detection
◦ Text to speech
◦ Speech to text synthesis
◦ Integration with Database systems
◦ Click-to-call for customers
◦ Low-cost communication

14. Getting started
Several solutions allow you to start a VoIP network
within no time.
◦ Best open-source software – Asterisk
◦ Hardware – Cisco VoIP products
◦ Best proprietary software – Microsoft Lync (for
enterprise), Skype (for consumers)

15. Asterisk
WO RL D’ S B EST O P E N S O U RC E S O F TWA RE PBX

16. Asterisk
◦ Works on popular Linux distributions
◦ Also available as a standalone Linux distribution called
AsteriskNow.
◦ Supports VoIP.

17. Automated Attendant
◦ A “sweet voice” that greets you when you call a number.
◦ Mostly plays a message and asks you to dial extension
number of the person
◦ May be, takes the voice message too!

18. How Asterisk works
PSTN Line

19. Asterisk features
IVR AMI AGI
Dialplans Voicemail Call routing
ACD
Automated
Attendant
FAX

20. Automated Attendant
◦ A “sweet voice” that greets you when you call a number.
◦ Mostly plays a message and asks you to dial extension
number of the person
◦ May be, takes the voice message too!

21. FAX
◦ Asterisk can be used to send and receive Fax.
◦ Only supports TIFF format
◦ There is no “interface”, leaving that part for the “web
developers”.

22. Call Routing
◦ Can perform conditional or unconditional routing of calls
◦ Can route calls to local or international numbers too!
◦ Works within the LAN also.

23. Voicemail
◦ Records caller’s message and saves in a sound file

24. Dialplans
◦ Structured sequences of commands that are fired when a
phone call is received
◦ Dialplans can be used to invoke native Asterisk
commands or even system commands.
◦ Typical dialplan would play “music-on-hold” while the
agents are too busy to answer the call.

25. Automated call distribution
◦ Asterisk will distribute the calls based on pre-decided
sequence between a queue of agents
◦ The sequence can be First-come-first-serve, Round robin
or even a random one.

26. AMI
◦ Asterisk Management Interface.
◦ Set of APIs that allow you to control Asterisk server from
remote location.

27. AGI
◦ Asterisk Gateway Interface.
◦ You can run your own C/C++/C#/Python/Ruby/Php/Shell
scripts etc when a phone call is received.
◦ Most powerful feature!

28. IVR
◦ Interactive Voice Response
◦ Grabs the DTMF tones from the caller to give a “menu-driven”
interactive experience
◦ You see this in mostly all customer support centers

29. Career in VoIP
◦ VoIP is the Future.
◦ Asterisk is the best way to get started with VoIP
◦ VoIP career is a recession-proof career for students of
CE/IT as well as EC because
◦ No programming knowledge necessary
◦ Basic networking knowledge will be enough
◦ Rest, you can figure out.
◦ Some certifications – CISCO, EC-Council, etc.

30. Thank you
MAIL ME ON KAUSHAL@PRATIKAR.COM