Open Telephony Server
 Introduction
ECTF View of CT
Our View of CT

Project
Project objetives
Components
Future components
SourceForge Project

Other things
Credits
Last word

 

ECTF view of Open Computer Telephony

This architecture is an effort to make the computer telephony world a little more open than what has been until now, adding a client/server architecture, standard based hardware bus interoperatibility, H.100, H.110, a C API exposing the server services S.100, a stream oriented protocol for client server communication, S.200, and a driver to server interface, S.300, that is in draft and unpublished until now, that makes possible for hardware manufacturers write drivers for their hardware to be supported by the server, the draft could be obtained by joining the ECTF.

The other standards is JTAPI or C.100 that is the basis for the call control management software. Today the only implementation of a server is from Dialogic Corp. now a subsidiary of Intel Corp. and with strong alliances with Microsoft Corp. and certainly will be the defacto CT Server for Windows NT.

OpenComm view of Open Computer Telephony

We have chosen to make an object oriented open telephony server. The development 
process has also taken some insights from the Sun Java Community, Netscape and Linux, we decided to make it an open source project to provide to the community a way to innovate and to contribute to this project and at the same time make the real revolution on open computer telephony solutions happen!

This is an exciting time for a project like this with all the hype on low cost telephony hardware like QuickNet and some voicemodems, software stacks like openH323,  and a lot of business grade telephony hardware starting to interoperate via the H.100 bus, and also a lot of things from the Telco grade telephony resources with compactPCI and hot swap capabilities, and also a lot happening on real high density huge applications like H.100 to ATM bus adaptors that make possible have clusters of computer telephony servers running maybe in huge call centers and Telco operators.

Project objective

To develop high quality software, laying down the foundation for the new generation of pbx, switches and computer telephony applications based on open source and, if hardware drivers are available :), the Linux operating system, creating a revolution on the today monolithic, proprietary, closed and slow paced industry of telephony equipment and applications.

This revolution is nothing but what happened a decade and half ago with the revolution on the micro computing vs. the mainframes and after that with the windows operating system making possible multiple applications to run at the same time, sharing the screen and written to be independent of video adapters and printer models.
The things that are different is that we already now what model succeeded and also how we could make it better.

Credits

I would like to offer my thanks to the following people that in different ways worked and helped in the project with design insights, critics, coding and a lot of patience:

  • Emerson Yasununga
  • Ernesto Corvi
  • Jorge Del Teglia
  • Jorge de Leonardis
  • Levi Leal Sellan

Last words

This work is a pre alpha release, this is been distributed not as a finished product but as a preliminary work intended to be the base for developers wanting to make development on it, or just to se it for fun.

 

Juan E. Bernabó
Open Telephony Server