We are happy to announce the foundation of the VoIP-On-Tap meetup group. You can register at http://www.meetup.com/voipontap/.

The VoIP-On-Tap is an Israeli VoIP and Telecom enthusiasts meetup group, with the soul target to advance and promote the adaptation of cutting-edge VoIP technologies and Open Source telecom in particular. The meetups take place once a month at the GreenfieldTech offices, located in Herzeliya, Israel. Meetups are normally in Hebrew, however, if there will be a request from the audience to shift to English – that is also possible (we want everybody to participate).

Yesterday (2/10/2013) was the first meetup, where we actually tested the initial format. We were very happy with the turn-out – specifically due to the fact that all the participants were people we don’t know from the industry. The meeting’s subject was WebRTC and Asterisk, specifically – how can a Chrome based WebRTC SIP client connect to Asterisk via a WebSocket and make phone calls.

In the next few weeks we will be releasing a few demos of WebRTC and how it works with Asterisk. It is our belief that within the next 18-24 months vendors will start pushing our WebRTC based products. We’ve already seen announcements from AudioCodes regarding a WebRTC based IP Phone – and we expect to see more products coming out in the next months. We are still evaluating the performance and resource consumption of the WebRTC operation in comparison to normal Asterisk operations – however, not specific differences had been noted so far.

Our next meeting will take place on the 06/11/2013 – which is titled – “Asterisk 101 – An introduction and Architecture overview”. The purpose of this meeting, is to allow new users/developers to get to know the basic core architecture of Asterisk – and what various variables can impact its performance and overall well being.