More Than Two Million Downloads of Asterisk in 2010

Before turning off my laptop, an exciting new announcement came in my sight: Asterisk had more than 2 million downloads in 2010. That is to say about an average of 5500 downloads per day. And this is the growing power of the world’s most welcome open source PBX software! I would love to share the news with everyone of you.

Digium caps off a year marked by strong growth in the use of Asterisk and substantial technical advances in the product. Contributions from the open source community matched Digium’s investment in Asterisk over the past year. To date, more than 9,800 people have contributed code to Asterisk, including more than 200 who worked on Asterisk 1.8. After releasing version 1.8 in October, the momentum continued later that month when the company also announced a new open source project, Asterisk SCF™. Enthusiasm for Asterisk among users, including developers, resellers, integrators and systems administrators, also increased as they downloaded the software more than two million times in 2010.

Asterisk turns an ordinary computer into a communications server that can power IP PBX systems, VoIP gateways, conference servers and other communication applications. In over 170 countries today, small businesses, large enterprises, call centers, carriers and governments are using Asterisk to create standards-based, feature-rich communications systems at a fraction of the cost of proprietary systems. Digium estimates that more than one million servers around the world are currently running Asterisk to handle billions of minutes of phone calls.

“Asterisk has made an indelible impression on the voice communications industry in the 11 years since it was released,” said Bryan Johns, Digium’s community director. “Its appeal keeps growing as businesses look for the value, flexibility, standards compliance and the technical superiority that result from the contributions of thousands of talented and visionary software developers. Digium is proud to sponsor Asterisk and to be a part of its community, which now counts 73,000 registered members. The company continues to focus on Asterisk’s development, as we saw with the release of Asterisk 1.8 this fall and with the creation of a new open source project in Asterisk SCF.”

Well, enjoy it!

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U.S. has 21 million VoIP subscribers according to FCC report

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission reports that there are 21 million VoIP subscriptions stateside, and that the vast majority of them are residential customers. But it didn't count Skype subscribers.

These figures were announced by the FCC to accompany the release of its highly detailed 31-page report, "Local Telephone Competition". The report, however, isn't exactly what you might call "fresh" — although it was released just last Friday, its data set ends on December 31, 2008.

Don't expect 2010 numbers to be higher than end-of-2008 numbers, however. In a report published earlier this year, analysts at the Dell'Oro group said the the VoIP market had suffered greatly in recent years due to the market meltdown, and was only beginning to recover — or even stabilize — in 2010.

The FCC's report come with one enormous caveat that it buries in a footnote: the stats don't include Skype subscribers, but only phone-to-phone communications that enable customers "to receive calls that originate on the public switched telephone network and to terminate calls to the public switched telephone network." This omission doesn't render the numbers meaningless — it just means that there's a lot more VoIPing going on than the FCC reports.

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