Switching to VoIP: A Solutions Manual for Network Professionals reviewed by Robert 

Pritchett 

Author: Ted Wallingford 

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/view/au/1959

http://www.macvoip.com

O'Reilly 

http://www.oreilly.com

Booksite: 

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/switchingvoip/index.html

Released: June 2005 

$40 USD, $56 CND,  28.50 GBP,   35 Euro 

Pages: 477 

ISBN: 0596008686 

Requirements: Linux, Mac OS X or MS Windows and a desire 

to use Asterisk. 

Strengths: Cross platform approach to Asterisk. 

Weaknesses: None found.  

Switching to VoIP: A Solutions Manual for Network Professionals by Theodore Wallingford 

takes us soup to nuts with migrating from regular phone systems to Voice over IP or in using 

Internet Telephony.  

My experience as a Computer Telephony Engineer tracks nicely with what Ted Wallingford has 

put together here, but he takes it further by showing how to use Asterisk, an Open Source 

telephony server that runs on either Linux, FreeBSD or Mac OS X systems as a soft PBX 

(Private Branch Exchange).  This isn't so much a What book, but rather, a How book. And a lot 

of it revolves around Ted's findings regarding Open Source VoIP apps and uses Asterisk 

(created by Mark Spenser) as the foundation. A commercial version of Asterisk can be obtained 

from Digium at 

http://www.digium.com/

 with Open Source support at 

http://www.asterisk.org/

and documentation located at 

http://www.asteriskdocs.org/

. More can be discovered here: 

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2003/07/03/asterisk.html

. 

What held special interest for me was that apparently there is a version of Asterisk available for 

Mac OS X by way of 

http://www.macvoip.com/

, but found it here: 

http://www.versiontracker.com/php/search.php?mode=basic&action=search&str=Asterisk&plt%

5B%5D=macosx&x=0&y=0

  with support here 

http://www.voip info.org/tiki 

index.php?page=Asterisk%20MacOSX%20Support

 and here 

http://www.astmasters.net/

.  

  MPN, LLC 2005 macCompanion 

Page 50 

August 2005, Volume 3 Issue 8