----- Original Message ----- From: "asterisk" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion" <[email protected]>
Sent: Tuesday, October 11, 2005 12:15 AM
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Re: www.openpbx.org

The other thing that I think many are missing is the recent deal with Intel
and finally I remember that the Digium backed Asterisk Certification was
unfair and pricy since many guru developers would still need to take the
exam to become certified just to line a few people's pocket even thought
they probably know more than the people teaching the cert course.

I don't really want to get sucked into the whole openpbx thing but I did just want to comment one point in this part:

I took the opportunity to do the Asterisk Certification Exam at Astricon Europe (I did not do the training course, however I did manage to pass). My impression of the multi choice 'theory' part of the exam is that it was written deliberately to encourage people to undertake the paid training course. A number of the questions were involved with stuff that someone building asterisk systems would never ever have to deal with or think about such as the vendors behind some of the VOIP standards, other esoteric historical information that would never be used, and various obscure asterisk command line switches and cli commands. Of course, I'm sure that the paid training course has a couple hours devoted to such things.

The practical part of the exam showed a distinct USA bias - It was in terms of T1's and analog zap extensions. I am from Australia, and the exam was in Europe, these parts of the world generally use BRI ISDN and PRI E1 with hdb3 and crc4 line protocols and channel 16 as the D channel. I'm not sure about Europe, but in Australia up until very recently the Zaptel analog cards were not certified for connection to the PSTN, which makes knowledge of them irrelevant for this part of the world. I don't know how to configure a T1 and I probably will never need to in my * career. The certification testing should be regionalised for the specific country or part of the world it is being administered in.

Since the exam I have heard nothing, no congratulatory email, no certificate with a dCAP membership number, no login to a website or dCAP community forum etc. No access to digium or asterisk logos to put on my business cards or website, no listing of certified people on the Digium website. So at the moment I don't really see what benefit there is to paying a couple hundred dollars for the exam. Sure, I tell people that I am certified, but if they ask for proof I have none to give. I did email Digium about this and received a vague reply about printing up and mailing out some plaques at some time in the future. To me it almost seems like Digium are treating their dCAPS as competition rather than partners given the lack of support to date.

Craig


Thanks,
Steve

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