Main portion of the advantages of the Asterisk server appears from it being an open source downloadable product. Most of the users, especially business people, can find it difficult to understand the idea behind this principle, or free software, but a business models behind open source are different and specific, as in case with Asterisk server.
IDC projected over 9 billion minutes of voice traffic to travel over worldwide packet networks in 2000, exceeding 135 billion minutes in 2004. Service revenue is projected at 1.6 billion in 2000 and 18.7 billion in 2004.