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CHAPTER 27
Asterisk: A Future for Telephony
Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of
the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
—Winston Churchill
We have arrived at the final chapter of this book. We’ve covered a lot, but we hope
that we have made it clear that this book has merely scratched the surface of this phe-
nomenon called Asterisk. To wrap things up, we want to spend some time exploring
what we might see from Asterisk and open source telephony in the near future.
When we wrote the first edition of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, we confidently
asserted that open source communications engines such as Asterisk would cause a shift
in thinking that would transform the telecommunications industry. In many ways, our
belief has been proven correct. While the telecom industry still has much evolving to
do, Asterisk has played a key role in fomenting a shift in thinking that has affected the
entire industry.
The Problems with Traditional Telephony
Although Alexander Graham Bell is most famously remembered as the father of the
telephone,
*
the reality is that during the latter half of the 1800s, dozens of minds were
working toward the goal of carrying voice over telegraph lines. These people were
mostly business-minded folks, looking to create a product through which they might
make their fortunes.
We have come to think of traditional telephone companies as monopolies, but this was
not true in their early days. The early history of telephone service took place in a very
competitive environment, with new companies springing up all over the world, often
with little or no respect for the patents they might be violating. Many famous monop-
olies got their start through the waging (and winning) of patent wars.
* Ever heard of Elisha Gray or Antonio Meucci?
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