Trip report on Astricon: A conference about Voice over IP

[Jon maddog Hall]

Hi,

I went to Astricon last week.  It consisted of one day of tutorials, with the
three streams of tutorials being: Beginning, Intermediate and Expert.  This
was followed by one day of conference that was single-stream and one day of
"developers meeting".  If you took all three days your fees were $400.

The conference organizers expected 100-150 people.  Instead 450+ showed up,
with a lot of them registering at the last minute.

The conference focused on the one element of VoIP called "Asterisk", which
is a piece of software that allows you to have a PBX on inexpensive Intel boxes
running Linux.

The audience of the conference was pretty well mixed, with some people who
never ran Asterisk, to some people who had run it at home, others at work,
and still others who were installing it at customer sites.  When asked if
anyone had installed it at sites where 100 or more simultaneous callers were
talking, about ten hands went up.  Recognize that a rule of thumb in the
telecom arena says that 100 or more simultaneous users means 1000 subscribers,
well into the medium to large company.

No one seemed to have any complaints about the way the software worked, or the
quality of the calls, etc.  Caveats were heard to "make sure you have enough
bandwidth and CPU", but that seemed to be easy to calculate and supply.

I met Mark Spencer, the originator, architect and project lead (think
of him as the Linus Torvalds of Open Source PBX) of Asterisk, and the CTO and
President of Digium.  Mark is a nice guy, who like a lot of other Geeks whose
project has gotten bigger than they were aware of, was a bit overwhelmed not
only by the number of people there, but of the intensity of the business
and the audience.  An interesting part is that Mark somehow relates the fact
that I spoke at Linux Expo in 1999 to the inspiration for the start of his
project.  [Mental note to maddog: Never do a speech on how to make a nuclear
weapon.]

There were a few vendors present.  Most were selling boards or desktop
telephony equipment, or services.  No system vendors were there.

Various people hinted that both large telephone companies and small ISPs were
contacting them to see what they could do with the software.

Various case studies were done showing that even considering frugal spending
on the purchase of a PBX off of Ebay with its associated boards, the savings
of replacing it with Asterisk and free software was just astronomical.

The whole conference reminded me of the early days of Linux, and the Linux
Expo conferences held down in Raleigh, North Carolina.

The next conference is aimed at May of 2005 in Europe.  Exact dates and place
are unknown at this point.

md
-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
Voice: +1.603.672.4557       Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
WWW: http://www.li.org

Board Member: Uniforum Association, USENIX Association

(R)Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several countries.
(R)Linux International is a registered trademark in the USA used pursuant
   to a license from Linux Mark Institute, authorized licensor of Linus
   Torvalds, owner of the Linux trademark on a worldwide basis
(R)UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the USA and other
   countries.