I recently installed a VoIP system at work for a small office expansion we did. In the grand scheme of things it was an incredibly simple affair consisting of a pair of Cisco routers with VoIP boards installed which were then slaved to the PABX in each office.
If you've been reading my website you'll know that when I get interested in something I get fanatical about it. Well that's what happend here. I started to look into a larger VoIP system for use in another project I was working on. One thing led to another and now I have completed 5 installs using a package called Asterisk which runs on Linux.
My system at home lives on my Linux box. It was very easy to configure thanks to some guides I found on the net (see the links section below). All I needed to get a basic computer based switchboard (PABX) running was software. All my desktop machines run Windows 2000 or XP and so I downloaded a copy of SJPhone to use as a software telephone. These software phones, or SIP Phones, use the sound card in one's PC so that you can hear and speak to the other people.
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I now have a system that allows you to pick up your phone,
dial one of the numbers at the top of the page and get connected to me. The call will ring
right here at my PC. It doesn't care where I am as long as I'm connected to the Internet.
Pretty cool huh? So how does it work? Firstly I built the Asterisk system on my Linux box. I then installed SJPhone on 2 machines and configured it to use the Linux box as a proxy. Asterisk was configured with the IP numbers of the Windows machines so that when I dialed 6000 from one machine I got connected to the other. So far so good but what about making outside calls? The next step was to register for a FreeWorldDialup account. They gave me a FWD number and another SIP Phone called X-Lite which is much better than SJPhone (IMHO) and its free!! I then had to configure Asterisk to connect to FWD and forward any incoming calls to my Windows machine. As I use many Windows machines in my house I configured Asterisk to call all of my Windows machines in a kind of hunt group manner. Now when a FWD call arrives it rings all of my machines. So far though I only have an Internet based phone system. What about a real phone number? There are many places on the Net where one can obtain a real telephone for use with your FWD (see links section below) so I grabbed a UK and a USA number. When you register for these numbers they ask you for your FWD account number. The phone call is then sent to my FWD number which in turn is sent to my Linux box for delivery to my other machines. WAY COOL!! As I'm getting quite a bit of interest in this from many folks I've made up a page with all my settings on it to help others set up their own Asterisk server. |
Links:FreeWorldDialup.com is the biggest free PC to
PC phone network.
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My numbers:Via PSTN in the UK on 0870-3404560; the USA on
(360)382-1962 |
© & ® Mark A Phillips, G7LTT 1995-2004
This page was last updated Friday October 08, 2004 22:47 Eastern Daylight Time
