Well, a few weeks ago I really wanted to get a home phone setup for my house. My wife an I have been using our cell phones for pretty much everything for the last 2 years and thought it would be a good time to get something else. So instead of taking the easier route with a telephone company, I chose to setup Asterisk on an old extra computer with a Sipura SIP converter connected to a traditional home phone. My VoIP provider is TelIAX out of Colorado and so far has been pretty cheap. I would say the support isn’t the best but as long as you know what you are doing, the system is always online. The real reason I chose them was their IAX2 support. I didn’t want to have a huge number of ports opened on my firewall to allow SIP to work. Also, traditionally SIP has not been the nicest with NAT though Asterisk does a pretty good job with that issue.
Instead of going command line or even installing the package manually, I chose Fonality’s trixbox CE which is free and is an all-in-one solution for IP telephone. At least on the server side. Install is straight forward, answer a few questions and it’ll eventually reboot and you’ll have a functioning Asterisk server with FreePBX installed as well as some other goodies.
Once you have trixbox up and running, you login to the web GUI and start configuring. Mine is http://192.168.1.10. Under FreePBX I had to configure 3 things:
1. Trunk – This is to tell Asterisk who to connect to for inbound and outbound calling. You have to configure things like registration strings, usernames, passwords, and any specific information for your provider. I have attached my configuration to this post.
2. Extension – I created a new extension (201) to allow my Sipura SPA-1000 to register to my trixbox. The setup on that was fairly easy with just an extension number, password and a few options for voicemail and fax.
3. Inbound/Outbound routes – Tell Asterisk to use a specif trunk for outbound calls and specify what dial patterns you want it to pick up on. Then on inbound you need to tell Asterisk what extensions to ring when a call is coming in.
That’s it. Really, really simple. This was not my first time with trixbox but it was the first time that I actually got it to work. I was quite surprised how clean the calls sound through the Internet, I was expecting to need to do QoS to get it right. I’ll still do that but so far I have not needed to.
My next goal is to get some of the advanced features running. Music on hold, failover call routing, etc.