Chapter 11. Asterisk: The Future of Telephony

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you,
then they fight you, then you win .

Mahatma Gandhi

We have arrived at the final chapter of this book. We've covered a lot, but we hope that you now realize that we have barely begun to scratch the surface of this phenomenon called Asterisk. To wrap things up, we want to spend some time exploring what we might see from Asterisk and open source telephony in the near future.

While prognostication is always a thankless task, we are confident in asserting that open source communications engines such as Asterisk herald a shift in thinking that will transform the telecommunications industry. In this chapter, we will discuss some of our reasons for this belief.