A new South African company, Open Voice, has launched into the local market with a range of low-cost telephony products, including voice over IP solutions. The reason for the low cost? Because they have turfed out the proprietary software they were developing and adopted the freely available open source Asterisk software. Asterisk is an open source telecommunications platform, designed to allow different types of IP telephony hardware, middleware and software to interface with each other consistently, while maintaining quality of service. Asterisk has become the de facto standard for voice switching and PBX functions within the open source environment.