Ask your self the following question: Do I have documented my dial plan? Do I know which contexts are in use and which contexts which are included where?

Do you have a document describing your dial plan? Probably not. Most of the people managing Asterisk by hand never care to document the structure of their dial plan - after all - It's a text file - documenting a text file is stupid work!

If your dial plan becomes quite extensive after a while - or if you become in charge of an previous Asterisk installation - you really wish for some documentation of the structure of the dial plan.

Even with just a few contexts it can become a daunting task to change an existing dial plan. Even if you do not need to really amend your dial plan - just having a graph of how your dial plan is organized is really a good thing to have in your PBX documentation.

There is a tool that will help you getting the big picture of your dial plan: JUNG (Java Universal Network/Graph Framework). The tool will not work with the Asterisk dial plan "out of the box", but Martin Smith of the Asterisk-Java blog have done all the hard work.

Even if the tool that Martin Smith created in May 2008 is "old news", his solution is so simple that it borders to ingenuity - it's worth repeating for new and old Asterisk manager alike.

Read his full article and feed your dial plan into his tool at Visualizing your dialplan with a graph

There are some speculation going on regarding a new iPod Touch having a built in microphone and some more memory (i.e. 64 GB).

Ken Camp have written an excellent piece does not believe that the VoIP on iPod Touch will become a VoIP hit with pre-teenagers. This may be true in the US, but on this side of the pond I have more than one indication that Andy Abramson's views are very correct. It is true that youngsters do text a lot - but they still make a lot of phone calls. I take the bus to and from work each day and have the "luxury" of observing how the younger generation uses their mobile phones.

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Back in April 2009 I wrote about why I did not think that an IPO in 2010 is very likely for Skype.

One of the arguments I used was the issue Skype had with a patent with Joltid. Had is a very good word in this context, as Phil Wolff explain in The Skype's Not Falling.

What Phil, in my opinion, correctly states is that Skype has more than enough time to solve this issue by either license some other company's Peer-2-Peer technology - or - to code up their own.

Phil has been right on more than one occasion - and I doubt that is he is not right this time.

You have heard nothing until you have experience HD Voice (Wideband Audio) - even on equipment that does not physically support HD Voice.

The first time I experience HD Voice where by using two Snom telephones. Quality was very good, better than using G.711. Then exchanging the standard Snom receiver with their Klar Voice - and was literally blown away.

Due to the increased focus on HD Voice theses days, there will always be a lot of "nay-sayers" around. These people will write and say things that might not be quite true - or they will state right out speculative non-issues.

Actually, these people are spreading wrong information and myths.

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My company, Azuralis, is expanding our business into the UK market. So far we have had used a international DID aggregator with a limited SIP trunk of only a few channels.

Now we need at least 30 channels for Q3 2009, and probably around 120 channels for Q1 2010. Really not a big number of channels - but given our technical background, we probably are a "dream customer" with no support and paying our bills on time.

When I started digging into the matter, I thought that this is probably a walk in the park; I know the language, I understand the technology, and - I know a thing or two about the UK numbering plan.

Oh, boy, how wrong I was.

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Back in April, Telecom Montly had an article with the title Consumer VoIP Dying.

When I reported this link on Twitter along with a comment that said something in the realm of bad service offerings, Luca Filigheddu immediately stated something that may not seem quite obvious to anyone except long time VoIP people: The point is to make VoIP transparent to consumers... They don't have to care whether it is VoIP or something else - also Maxim chipped in: bad offerings? I've been using betamax providers (e.g. www.12voip.com) for the past 4 years and must have saved thousands.

I still stand by my comment on bad service offerings, at least in the northern parts of Europe, but I would not be very surprised if this is valid other places also.

What triggered my comment was the immediate reaction on why some companies are closing down their VoIP service: Bad service offerings.

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Nearly a month ago Steve Sokol announced that Digium is finally providing paid support for the Open Source version of the Asterisk software.

Back in March I did not want to comment on this particular news item. I would let the dust settle before commenting.

What implication will this have for the ecosystem around Asterisk?

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