No Beer, an occasional Whisky but rivers of Coffee!
With a background from LAN, WAN and security related issues I thought that including VoIP would be a walk in the park. I was sure as h@#$ up for a real surprise! It hasn’t made me rich, it keeps me working at least 15 hours a day including most holidays, but I just love it!
In November 2006 I kicked off my third company, Netsecur a/s. Primarily an IT consultancy corporation we soon decided to explore the possibilities of IP telephony, and like most other entrepreneurs we landed on Digium’s Asterisk. Our first PBX was based on VIA’s brand new C7 CPU coupled with Trixbox and worked like a dream.
I was happy with it but not totally satisfied. Even though it consumes less electric power than most other PCs it’s still not what I would label “Green”. And it has moving parts; fans on both heat-sink as well as power-supply in addition to one or two hard disk drives. And in my experience; what moves, breaks. So I kept on looking for the ultimate appliance, a “Green” box without moving parts.
My “dream-box” finally became a reality when I discovered the IP04 designed by David Rowe and manufactured by Atcom Technology in early 2007. It was not yet in production so I had to wait (im)patiently for several months.
I got in touch with Edwin of Atcom Technology on October 4 2007 and inquired about the availability of the IP04 and got a rather surprising reply. He told me that the PBX was in production, but due to the fact that the firmware was full of bugs he strongly advised me not to sell it to any business, it was only suitable for real Asterisk geeks. Despite his warning I decided to order two units for testing, and was he ever right! The GUI in perticular was so buggy that it was almost unusable, but it was very clear that it had a great potential. I assigned the job of fixing the firmware to Bruce, a 24 year old programmer from Bergen, Norway. I gave him the month of November to figure out if we should really go for it, and he came back and convinced me to do it.
Bruce had the first working release of what became known as VoIPtel GUI ready for CeBIT’08 in Hannover, Germany. Both Bruce and I were invited by Atcom to join them on their stand, they were very happy with the new firmware and wanted to make it the default for all new IP04‘s. We worked together with Peter, Chrystal and Edwin, all very friendly and hard working people with a lot of integrity. We had a great week together and I am truly looking forward to CeBIT’09 where we will work together again.
The VoIPtel GUI was without doubt a great improvement from what came before it, but we soon found out that it was plagued by old bugs and poor coding. Looking for other peoples mistakes in thousands of lines with code is extremely time consuming and not very rewarding, but this became the way that Bruce spent almost all the time that he was awake (yes, he did eat and go to the bathroom from time to time). He got some help from David and his Forum, but mostly he had to find and solve the problems on his own.
When Mark and his group made the recently released AsteriskGUI v2 available for the IP0x platform we decided that it was time to stop maintaining the VoIPtel GUI and introduce an entire new breed of firmware. The first release was made on December 2 with VoIPtel CE, short for Community Edition. VoIPtel SE (Supported Edition) bundled with a Support Contract was introduced on December 12 the idea being that while the Community want an inexpensive PBX to experiment with, the corporate world need the security and reliability that is only available from a commercial Support Team. And our Forum is Online! Both the Forum as well as this blog is made possible by Job Schouten in Holland, a first class Graphic Designer that we will maintain a very close relationship with.
So, what’s next? 3 weeks on a tropical beach with a drink in one hand and a lovely lady in the other? Not quite, we have a load of ideas and projects related to the IP0x line of PBX’s that is just waiting to be realized! And we are hiring help internationally in order to make it happen faster, a lot faster! If you are interested in what is yet to come, join our Forum and keep an eye on this blog. It’s going to be a h”¤# lot of FUN!