[qwerty456127]

Almost everybody seems using hardware phones (which are slightly harder to crack than softphones) to speak and Asterisk to implement any logic they need.

You will have to configure these yourself or pay somebody to do this for you.

100% hosted and supported services are way better because your are never gonna stop being attacked.

[the_only_law]

Random, but is there much money in Asterisk. I looked at it briefly for something, turns out it didn't fit my needs, but nearly all production grade telephony interfaces seem to be biased towards it (try getting help with DAHDI if you aren't using it). I'm just curious if it's and product worth learning how to hack on.

[wolrah]

> (try getting help with DAHDI if you aren't using it).

I mean, is it shocking that the Digium Asterisk Hardware Device Interface is primarily supported with Asterisk?

> I'm just curious if it's and product worth learning how to hack on.

Asterisk, Freeswitch, and Kamailio are the main open source telephony projects and are all also widely used as the "open core" of proprietary solutions so yeah there's plenty of room to make money selling support or addons for these projects.

That said, as someone who has been supporting Asterisk and Freeswitch for years now, I can't say I've ever had a situation where a DAHDI interface made sense over just using a standalone PSTN<>SIP gateway. Letting an Adtran TA9xx take care of integration with the PSTN and having the PBX side be pure VoIP makes things so much easier and more flexible IMO. The PSTN line is just one more SIP trunk, and any analog extensions we may have hooked up to FXS ports are just SIP extensions as far as the server is concerned.

If you want to dip your toes in I'd recommend setting up a FreePBX (Asterisk) or FusionPBX (FreeSwitch) instance. That gets you a nice web interface that you can point and click your way through to a usable setup while still being able to poke around at a low level as you learn how the system works.

[qwerty456127]

> Random, but is there much money in Asterisk.

I don't know what do you imagine as much money but there apparently is enough to make fairly good living in Europe.

[icedchai]

You may also want to take a look at Freeswitch, another open source PBX.