Services: Asterisk

Bare Asterisk, from the people who run it

A great deal of Asterisk in production has no web interface anywhere near it, and that is where most support offers stop. Hand written dialplan, AGI, AMI and ARI, builds compiled from source, appliances shipped inside somebody else's product: we build them, support them and take them on when the original engineer has gone.

"Nobody here can read extensions.conf any more"
"No inbound calls since the trunk re-registered"
"One way audio since the firewall was changed"
"The switch was hit for toll fraud overnight"

Talk to an engineer Raise a ticket

We run it ourselves

Every call into GEN passes through Asterisk

GEN's own telephony has run on Asterisk since 2000. Every call into our offices, every engineer on shift and every out of hours escalation passes through switches we built, maintain, monitor and upgrade ourselves.

That is the difference at three in the morning. The engineer who picks up the fault is not reading a knowledge base article about a product nobody in the building has deployed. They are running the same versions, on the same kind of hardware, with the same trunk providers, and there is a fair chance they have already seen the fault on our own estate.

If a switch is down now, raise it on the HelpDesk.

Watched around the clock

Peer and trunk registration
Call quality, jitter and packet loss
Disk, load and recording storage
Fraud patterns and unusual destinations
Certificate and security update status

Most of what we fix is raised by us rather than reported by you.

What we do

First class work, not an exception

Where nobody on your staff understands the switch any more, we audit it, document it and take it on from there.

Dialplan

extensions.conf read, documented and rewritten where it needs to be, including the older Macro and GoSub patterns and AEL. IVRs, multi-tier routing and call flows that grew a case at a time until nobody could follow them.

Channel Drivers and Migration

chan_sip to chan_pjsip, with endpoint, AOR and identify configuration, DAHDI and analogue or ISDN cards where they are still in service, and the codec and transcoding decisions that go with them.

AGI, AMI and ARI

Integrations with CRM, ERP, databases and web services: screen pops, click to dial, real time call control and analytics, and the scripts that quietly stopped working after an upgrade.

Builds and Packaging

Asterisk compiled from source, module selection, patched builds, pinned versions for embedded and appliance use, and builds reproduced for hardware whose original supplier has gone.

Media and NAT

One way audio, RTP port ranges, SBC and firewall behaviour, direct media, jitter and packet loss, traced with packet captures rather than guessed at.

Security and Toll Fraud

Exposed SIP ports, weak endpoint secrets, fail2ban and rate limiting, dial pattern restrictions, and the post-incident work when a switch has already dialled premium rate numbers overnight.

Asterisk versions

1.4, 1.6 and 1.8	End of life, still supported by GEN
11, 13, 16 and 18	End of life, still supported by GEN
20	Long term support
21	Standard release, end of life
22	Current long term support
23	Latest standard release

Open source

Audited, extended and adapted without waiting on a vendor

Asterisk is open source, so a switch can be audited and extended to suit the business rather than a vendor's roadmap, and a well maintained one runs for years without a crash. We contribute code and documentation back to the community, and the GENWiki holds source code and resources free to use.

Configuring SIP trunks is everyday work for us, and the HelpDesk knowledge base holds configuration examples for many providers. Want to build on the platform itself? See Development.

Questions

Asterisk Questions

Do you support bare Asterisk without FreePBX?

Yes, as first class work: hand written dialplan in extensions.conf and AEL, AGI, AMI and ARI integrations, builds compiled from source, and switches whose original engineer has long since left.

Can you migrate a switch from chan_sip to chan_pjsip?

Yes, including the endpoint, AOR and identify configuration, the codec and transcoding decisions that go with them, and any DAHDI, analogue or ISDN cards still in service on the same switch.

What do you do if our switch has been used for toll fraud?

Raise it on the HelpDesk and we will carry out the post-incident work: exposed SIP ports, weak endpoint secrets, fail2ban and rate limiting, and dial pattern restrictions so premium rate destinations cannot be dialled again.

Do I need a contract, and how quickly will you respond?

No contract, no minimum term and no notice period: you buy hours at published rates and use them as you need them. Service levels run from a next business day response to 30 minutes, 24 hours a day, every day of the year.