Conventional and VoIP Telephony Using Asterisk

VoIP Business Phone System in use

There's a revolution going on in telephony at the moment. You may have heard of "Voice over IP", or VoIP. Instead of using traditional telephone lines, VoIP uses the internet to carry your conversations. It's cheap and highly functional, bringing “big switch” phone system facilities to small and medium businesses for the first time. However, because the technology is so new and unfortunately, massively jargon-ridden, it can be difficult to understand how it fits with your existing conventional telephone lines and numbers.

VoIP Business Phone System in use

What is Asterisk?


Asterisk is the most widely installed VoIP PBX platform in the World. Some estimates put the installed base at many tens of thousands. Selintra is an authorised reseller for Digium, the company which developed Asterisk. This means that we have huge in-depth experience of developing and delivering highly resilient Asterisk based PBXs. It also means that you can be confident when you buy a system from Selintra that it is backed up, not only by us, but by the original developer.

What is SARK?


SARK, is a developer workbench for Asterisk developed by Selintra. It allows you to set up and tailor your telephone system very quickly and easily using an intuitive GUI interface. It also helps with many of the more mundane and time consuming tasks associated with building a VoIP system; for example, it can automatically program all of your VoIP phones for you and manage all of your adds, moves and changes.

How do Asterisk and SARK fit with my existing phone lines?


With SARK/Asterisk, you won't need to worry because you can have both VoIP and traditional TDM telephone lines (analogue, ISDN2E or ISDN30E) on the same system. In fact, you won't even know which the system is using at any given moment because it will intelligently route your phone calls to minimise your costs and maximise availability. Your new system simply plugs straight in to your existing BT cicuits, and into the internet. Both the old technologies and the new are then immediately available to carry telephone traffic.

Who Benefits from VoIP?


VoIP allows you to run your business in new, more efficient ways. For example; homeworkers can be connected directly to the central PBX, allowing calls to be routed to them just as if they were at the office. Moreover, such calls are completely free. If your business is spread across multiple locations then VoIP can remove or dramatically reduce the costs involved in inter company communication, whether your sites are just a few miles apart or on different continents.

How does SARK Asterisk compare with traditional PBX?


In short, it demolishes them. Since its introduction in 2003, Asterisk has taken the World by storm. It is incredibly reliable and functionally it will equal or better most conventional PBX offerings while leaving them for dead when it comes to VoIP capabilities. Selintra's unique SARK management & logic layer makes Asterisk easy to set-up and brings additional functionality to the system in terms of remote management and its ability to automatically recognise and provision your IP telephones. Below are listed just some of the product features

SARK features

Sark Logo

Digium AA60 available

Digium's new AA60 Appliance is now available in the UK.

SARK 2.2 Released

Selintra releases SARK 2.2 for Asterisk 1.4

SARK 2.2 .iso image

Selintra announces SARK V2R2 .iso controlled release

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