Wired:There's certainly a lot of shaking-up going on at what we might call the business end of the phone business: the phones themselves, writes Danny O'Brien
With the iPhone now safely launched in parts of Europe (though not Ireland), and Google introducing their open Android platform for mobiles, perhaps we'll see even more frantic competition in the mobile phone contract market.
But, far more quietly, there's been an equally revolutionary change in what you might call the other business end of telephony: the PBX exchanges that sit between most offices and the rest of the telephonic world.
Private Branch eXchanges (PBXs) are the boxes that allow a business to run many desk phones from just a few incoming phone lines. With a bit of intelligence they also run most business voicemail, forwarding, international bill juggling and other features like conference calls and hold music.
It used to be that managing PBXs was a dark art, contracted out by companies either to the state phone company or to a local business service company.
The office phones worked although, when they did go awry, you needed to call out the engineers, to whom you pay a hefty monthly fee.
As with many contracted services, if we weren't all so busy we'd find much to complain about. But we don't have time to run our own telephones so we just live with what we have.
When it comes down to it, though, PBXs are just standard software with a sprinkling of non-standard hardware.
And as with so much that touches upon information technology, as soon as standard hardware like the common-or-garden PC became powerful enough to handle PBX software, so open source hackers created free code to do just that.
Asterisk has been around now since 1999, when its creator, Mark Spencer, first attempted to replicate PBX software on a commodity PC running Linux. These days you can get Asterisk free on a single CD and, with one reboot, convert a PC that's too old to run Windows XP into a free PBX for your business.
Of course, most PCs don't have what you really need in a PBX - a way to connect dozens of wired telephones. But you can get cards that plug into the back of any PC to provide all the phone plugs you need.
Or, if you're starting from scratch, you can buy SIPphones from many phone retailers that just plug into a standard ethernet (local area network) socket and talk over the net to the Asterisk PBX.
Asterisk itself can connect to the rest of the world using more hardware, or just an account on a Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) provider, which will give you a phone number that works over the internet rather than via your local telephone exchange.
Asterisk has moved from being a fascinating diversion for those of us who are slightly too interested in telephone systems into a stable enough platform for dozens of support and service companies to base their living upon.
Even if you're still paying that contractor to run your office phone system there's a good chance they might be using Asterisk under the hood.
But what does that signal about this end of the telephone business. Well, smaller businesses can now have the same features as multi-nationals when it comes to their phone system.
Providers of value-added services (like VoIP) have a level playing field on which to create their innovations. Asterisk provides all of the benefits of an open platform to what was previously the most closed and arcane systems in the world.
But is the fact that we can now so easily recreate these PBXs in standard software and hardware a sign that we no longer need them? That the really valuable services are now elsewhere?
Clerical staff often spend much of their time on their mobile phone rather than their clumsy desk phone: or at least would prefer to if they weren't paying for the minutes. In many jobs a business mobile is as much a necessary perk as the work car.
And while extensions and voice mail may have been exotica 30 years ago, most of the features a mobile telecoms company provides to its customers easily compete with what you could do with Asterisk or even a high-end PBX.
It's not ironic that a cheap, expandible, flexible PBX system should emerge just as far more tempting options are emerging in other sectors of the market. It's a sign that the world of the local private exchange has become a commodity. Asterisk now provides a high basic minimum that you would want from any phone system. It doesn't beat the best PBXs money can buy, but it'll prevent anyone making quite so much money with a closed and inflexible system ever again.
The fight, then, moves on. Both iPhone and Google's Android platform push the attack from the wired telecommunication companies, whose lock-in at the telephone end used to be absolute, to the wireless phone companies whose lock-in is still in place.
Of the two, Android, which runs Linux, may well be the one that commoditises the mobile phone system as effectively as Asterisk. It may not beat the iPhone, but it'll prevent anyone else making quite so much money with a closed phone ever again.
