Young Programmer Takes On The Entire Telecom Industry
Spencer is the inventor of Asterisk, a free software program that establishes phone calls over the Internet and handles voicemail, caller ID, teleconferencing and a host of novel features for the phone. With Asterisk loaded onto a computer, a decent-size company can rip out its traditional phone switch, even some of its newfangled Internet telephone gear, and say good-bye to 80% of its telecom equipment costs. Not good news for Cisco, Nortel or Avaya.
Since Spencer released Asterisk to the world in 1999 as a phone operating system, it has been downloaded 500,000 times, and it continues to be downloaded 1,000 times per day. Some 350 contributors have taken it from a rocky voice system to one with clear calling and more than 100 features.
"You couldn't set out to build a system like this. No one company could do it all. When you open source, people just keep improving things," says Spencer.
Electric utility Southern Co. is using Asterisk in a pilot program to translate voicemail into text messages for 30 managers' BlackBerrys.
The town of Manchester, Conn. is about to begin using Asterisk to run an application tied to the 911 service.
In Rensselaer, Ind. computer science professor Brian Capouch has built a commercial-class phone system that already touches 20 communities and covers more than 1,000 square miles.
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