Documentation
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Books
Asterisk -the future of telephony
[August 2005] AsteriskTFOT.pdf Jim Van Meggelen, Jared Smith, and Leif Madsen
VoIP-4D Primer -Building Voice Infrastructure in Developing Regions
The VoIP-4D Primer is a free guide available in four major languages. The work is an effort to disseminate the use of telephony over the Internet in developing regions. The 40-page guide targets both technical and non-technical readers. The first part presents the essentials of telephony over the Internet. For those interested in the more technical details, hands-on guidelines and configuration files are included in the second part. The examples provide essential background to build your own low-cost telephony system.
Read more here.
Wireless Networking in the Developing World
This book was created by a team of individuals who each, in their own field, are actively participating in the ever-expanding Internet by pushing its reach farther than ever before. Over a period of a few months, we have produced a complete book that documents our efforts to build wireless networks in the developing world [source: http://wndw.net]
The book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.
The book is available for download:
For more translations, please click here.
Software
Softphones
ekiga-setup-2.0.11-BETA.exe kiax-0.8.51-win32-install.exe
Tutorials
Practical Guide - How to setup VoIP Infrastructure using AsteriskNOW
This practical tutorial is based on the AsteriskGUI available in Asterisk 1.4.x series. A new distribution known as AsteriskNOW, includes a straightforward installer and all the software packages for Asterisk production and development. Although the distribution is still in beta stage (beta5 in November 2007), it has been designed with a very clean interface and a very intuitive “wizard”.
[Download]
Practical Guide - How to setup an IP04 Asterisk IP-PBX
This tutorial shows you how to set up 3 basic scenarios on the IP04 IP-PBX. The IP04 is a tiny, full function Asterisk IPPBX with 4 analogue ports. It retails for around $450 but can be potentially be built and deployed to developing regions for under $100. Configuration of the IP04 can be performed using just an analogue telephone even a PC is optional! These exercises show just how easy Asterisk configuration can be on the IP04. Compared to commodity hardware (such a PC and PCI card), IP04 configuration is much easier.
[Download]
White Papers
The IP04 Open telephony hardware for developing regions, The Free Telephony Project
by David Rowe, Alberto Escudero-Pascual
We have a vision. Anyone should be able to make a phone call to anyone else. Telephony should be regarded as a human right, not a privilege of the developed world. With the IP04, open hardware, and minimal capital cost, this vision is now possible.
This document describes the IP04, a low cost open hardware IP-PBX developed by the Free Telephony Project1 for developing regions. The IP04 is a tiny, full function Asterisk-based IP-PBX with 4 analogue ports. It retails for around $400 but can be potentially be built and deployed to developing regions for under $100.
The hardware design is free as in speech. Anyone is welcome to copy, modify, and improve the hardware design, just like open software. Open hardware offers exciting new possibilities, for example dramatic end-user cost reductions; the potential for local manufacture; customisation to support developing world conditions such as low power and local languages; and flexibility, for example integration of solar charge controller and WiFi chip sets.
The IP04 is a mature design that is in volume production today. The next step is to deploy the technology for field trials to optimise the system and evaluate business models to support viral growth of the technology.
This document summarizes the IP04 project, including history of the product and key benefits for the developing world. Finally we present the outline of a plan for the next stage in the roll out of this technology: beta deployment of the 100 IP04 nodes.
[Download]
Making IP Telephony knowledge accessible, A pre-study of innovative approaches
by Alberto Escudero Pascual
One year ago (December 2006), we released the first edition of the VoIP4D Primer “Building Voice Infrastructure in Developing Regions”. It is interesting to see how many things have already changed in one single year in the VoIP arena and we are not far from plug-and-play open telephony systems. VoIP is advancing quickly and setting up a PBX is getting easier and easier for the end user thanks to new user interfaces and dedicated software distributions. There is lots of interest in this area, proof of that is that the primer has been downloaded 150.000 times and included as reference material in several VoIP courses.
While the first edition of the primer focused on understanding the principles of VoIP and illustrating a few scenarios that you can use as a reference to configure Asterisk by editing their configuration files, in this document we will cover some of the projects that want to make the installation and management of Asterisk even more user-friendly.
The goal of this pre-study is to identify which technologies are there that can reduce the gap from newcomers to get started with VoIP and expand the existing community.
In this document we highlight three areas that you have looked into:
- Specialized Asterisk software distributions including graphical configuration tools (The Asterisk GUI-friendly projects)
- Installing Asterisk using virtualization (Asterisk & VMware)
- Specialized PBX hardware - Asterisk Appliances
As any other booming technology you will find difficult to catch up with what is going on and what projects are around. Many of the tools have changed name during the last years and many projects build their solutions based on existing work. During the preparation of this document we have identify a few aspects that limit the dissemination of open telephony (Section: Limiting factor for IP telephony disemmination). One of those limiting factors is to cope with all the technical jargon and have a clear picture of the existing initiatives and the interaction between them. We have included a sort description of some of those projects (Section: The jargon and the projects) so you can start with a better understanding of what is going on.
[Download]
