Star2Billing was kindly invited by Digium to attend Astricon in Washington DC this year where they donated an Open Source stand, sharing the floor with such Open Source notables as the FreePBX, Astlinux, OpenBTS, The 2600 Project, and The Atlanta Asterisk Users Group.
Our special thanks go to John Mullinux of http://www.cohutta.com and Steve Henke of http://www.xelatec.com, both stalwarts of The Atlanta Asterisk Users Group. Not only did they arrange to print our advertising collateral, they also picked us up from the airport after an epic drive from the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Although one of the main things we came to talk about was A2Billing, but there was a great deal of interest in our CDR-Stats project, http://www.cdr-stats.org the latest version of which (1.1.0) has been recently released, that allows the analysis and reporting on Asterisk CDR. We expect to be releasing install scripts for Asterisk, and various FreePBX /Asterisk aggregations.
Also on display, and creating a lot of interest was the new Mesh Potato, a mesh wireless device, and combined with an ATA (Analogue Telephone Adapter), just brought back from South Africa, where Areski, our Technical Director has been assisting with the Village Telco charity, see http://www.villagetelco.org.
We also previewed Pow2Wow, and web based conference manager for Asterisk, which we expect to release early in the new year replacing one of Areski’s earliest open source projects, WebMeetme.
We were however at Astricon to talk about A2Billing, and we were pleased to meet a large number of A2Billing users and customers, as well as some of the stars in the Asterisk world, such as Allison Smith, the voice of Asterisk, David Duffet, probably the world’s most prolific Asterisk trainer, Mark Spencer who should need no introduction, and some of the Asterisk development team such as Russell Bryant, Leif Madsen and Olle Johansson, to name a few.
Also at the conference, Digium made a number of announcements:-
- A new Wiki at https://wiki.asterisk.org
- Asterisk 1.8 released, supported for at least the next four years, with lots of valuable additions.
- Asterisk SCF (Scalable Communications Framework) where seamless fail-over to another server was demonstrated, mid conference call! Clearly this has huge implications for A2Billing, and we will keep you informed as this project develops.
We look forward to seeing our friends in The Asterisk Community at next year’s Astricon as well as any of our customers, past present or future. We highly recommend a visit.
Yours truly,
Areski, Joe and the Star2Billing Team.