Interview with Mark Spencer & Suzanne Bowen

I'm glad to say we just had a really nice and friendly interview with Mark Spencer from Digium; he's the creator of Asterisk, which is the most commonly used Open Source softswitch or VoIP PBX nowadays.

The questions asked were the following. Suzanne Bowen from DIDx and myself took turns to ask Mark, who gave us pretty interesting answers.

Questions were submitted to Suzanne from different users.

Please read them below and we'll post the interview as soon as edited and released.

1. Would you share one or two of the most innovative uses of Asterisk?

2. Fred Posner: Always respected Mark. A lot of the code asterisk uses was written a long time ago... and with the moving of PBX telephony to SIP, and the incredible movement there, such as new codecs... what is Asterisk doing to keep up with these new technologies?  

3. Alessandro Morelli: When mobile extension ? Right now, only landline device like voip phone or PC.

4. Allison Smith, voice of Asterisk asks: Did have any inkling whatsoever that Asterisk be as huge and empowering as it is today? Word is that you deveoped it as a way of not paying a high price for a VoIP system.

5. Sean Fairchild: Can he share about his airplane?

6.  Brough Turner, from the former NMS Communications, bought by another Company earlier this year: Let's talk about market share. I believe all open source PBXs (of which Mark's is the largest) now account for 20% of all PBX lines in North America.  I assume open source PBXs cost less per line than Nortel, Avaya, etc.  So, you're hollowing out a once large business that others took for granted before Asterisk came along.  Share some facts and figures.

7. Brough Turner: When will Asterisk support wideband audio between HD voice handsets like those from Polycom and Skype. Many want to understand your wideband audio plans.

8. Syed Osman, from Malasya, CEO of http://hatc.com: How can you make Asterisk to be a media station which can produce radio and video to phone as you dial extension?

9. Steve Cayona: What was he thinking when he wrote Cheops, that fine hacking, oops I mean network discovery tool?