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Build Your Own PBX
Kerbo writes "Kerry Garrison has written up a complete guide to building your own PBX with Asterisk@Home to create your own working PBX system. In the article, he shows how you can build a complete, working system for under $20 (assuming you have some old hardware laying around the house)."
Hmmmm. How about making a Linux distro that gives out a PBX/bastion host/firewall???
Ours (done in a modern machine, so it would have PCI 2.2 for the cards to drive Plain Old Phones) has a (not hard to do once the basics are working) callpath that's a caller-ID whitelist.
Calls from numbers "on the list" ring the phones, then go to voicemail, like "normal" calls would. Calls from one of our cellphones tell the caller how many new voicemails are waiting, then distinctive-ring the phones, then go to voicemail. Calls from unknown, private, or not-on-the-list numbers go straight to voicemail without ringing the phones.
You'll pry it out of my wife's cold dead hands...
With all this talk of voip here and there, I've never understood how the actual conversion from ip to pots actually takes place.
Basically I want to know how these companies do it. How do the perform this termination service? How small a scale could one do this himself?
So, this is a PBX. So, I can hook this hardware up to the telco and take incoming calls from clients anywhere in the world over IP and make a call for them to a telco phone number, and let them talk over my PBX, correct?
OK, but what I do not know is what kind of connection to the telco do I need to do this? Can I do it using my standard phone connection? I would think you need multiple lines outgoing to the telco POTS (plain old telephone system), correct? So, if I have N lines to the telco, I can handle a max of N calls from clients on my IP to Telco PBX, correct?
So, would this be cost effective as a business model? Is a certain number of lines required, etc?
TIA
eat shiat and bark at the moon
Hi,
I'm considering setting up Asterisk at home, however, the WAF (wife acceptance factor) is going to be very important here, so I'd like to make sure I know what I'm doing before I start. How hard is it to deploy an Asterisk@home with the following configuration:
Two outgoing lines (one for local calls via local telecom, one for US calls via VoIP (packet8 -- using their DTA-310), and three local extensions (only one will be a "real" telephone.
As I understand it, this means I need two FXOs, and one FXS. Can I use three separate cards for this, instead of buying a 2 or 4 port FXO, which seem to be more than 2* the cost of a single?
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
I could probably swing running the software and equipment, but I am lost with the administrative and telephony portion of having my own PBX.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Here's a REAL PBX that is my personal property.
It's a Rolm CBX II 9000 that is configured to handle 10,000 lines. (Yes, it's operational) It was purchased for $3,000,000 when it was brand new. It's had additional upgrades installed, it's net value was over $5,000,000 at one point in the very recent past.
It fills an entire building. So, compare that with this new tech and you'll all the more appreciate what you have in front of you...
Fucking THANK YOU!!
Once my SO figured out she could have this too if, and only if, daddy gets to buy a new machine. i said it'd probably needs a good amount of horsepower and needed a lot of ram - she was still stunned by the idea of having such a phone system, she didn't even question it.
Hot damn, new server AND a new phone system to play with - i looked at the gui screenshots of the astGUI client - holy shit, this is going to be fun.
On a somewhat related note, I've found this website to be invaluable when dealing with avalanches of acronyms.
Great! So now you can have real PABX functionality at home (SOHO) But how does it scale? How many people can actually have working phones on a system? Is it just the Hardware which needs to scale or are there limitations to Asterisk itself? If I could play with this at work, how many guys could I conceivably hook up to this (using just SIP calls, no external connections needed) What would be the number of concurrent calls? Is there any info on that (yeah, I know it's "@Home" but just wondered...) I've been aware of Astersk for ages, but having a 'self-intalling' PBX does lower the bar quite a bit.