Pingtel open source VoIP attacks Europe

Open source VoIP has been touted as bigger than Linux, and the competition is hotting up in Europe as one of the US pioneers crosses the Atlantic. The normally sleepy world of office telephony hardware, the private branch exchange (PBX) systems which put you on hold and transfer you to people’s secretaries, has already been shaken up by the arrival of voice over IP. VoIP has allowed a few new players such as Cisco to join Nortel, Siemens, Alcatel and the rest of the club of companies which supply proprietary PBX hardware at high margins. Recently, however, open source platforms are emerging which allow organisations to use a cheap off-the-shelf server to do exactly what a PBX would have done, and in many cases more, at a fraction of the cost.