I just came across a very interesting article from Dana Blankenhorn about how the future of telecommunications is open source. The Heavyweights of years past are quickly seeing the industry being seriously disrupted by a single open source application called, you guessed it, Asterisk.

From the article:

“The large carriers have Asterisk in their lab. Some of them have it in field test, or tucked away in their network,” Mark Spencer said. “It’s smaller outfits which are coming up with the innovations, like systems to let people win eBay auctions by phone, pay parking tickets, or make international cellphone calls free.”

I already know about quite a few ’small fish’ operations already starting to make very significant moves by leveraging open source technologies. The major players in the telecommunications industry will not be able to move fast enough to even attempt to compete with the small, agile, very niche focused companies of the future.

RIP Lucent, Avaya, Nortel

Related Posts:
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Digium Acquires Sokol & Associates, Astricon
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Digium and Bandwidth.com Come Together To Develop Open Source
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