Setting up Asterisk@Home as my home phone system
I’ve been playing with Asterisk@Home since version 1.0, but mostly in a virtual machine environment with no trunks, and only soft-phones (such as CounterPath’s X-Lite) extensions, just to get my head around it all. Before I implemented it at my house, I bought a couple of the cheap cloned X100P PCI cards to use as my FXOs while playing with it on a physical machine. Those cards where enough to make me want to scrap the idea completely – they were horrible for sound quality. Then a friend and co-worker of mine who was also playing with Asterisk at the time was looking for a reasonable deal on an all-in-one device to provide him with both an FXO and FXS. He came across the Sipura SPA-3000 -an awesome product. You plug your analog POTS phone line into the FXO Port, and your analog phone into the FXS port. After plugging the SPA-3000 into your home network, you can then configure Asterisk to use the SPA-3000 as both a SIP trunk, and SIP extension. I’ll provide the information on how to configure the SPA-3000 to work with Asterisk and vice-a-versa in a later post.
I ended up buying two of the SPA-3000s to use for both my incoming analog lines (one is actually a Packet8 VoIP line), and also to provide a couple of extensions to cordless analog phones. I needed more than 2 extensions, so I also bought 3 of the GrandStream BudgeTone 101 SIP phones. Even though they are the cheapest SIP phones on the market, after using them for a month, I would say that I am 90% satisfied with them. I’ll provide more info about these phones in another post.
Asterisk@Home comes with a very handy (although not yet flawless) web interface called Asterisk Management Portal or AMP, which was the primarily method I used for the basic configuration of the box. Without going into the step-by-step process I took to set it all up (since I didn’t think to take any notes at the time), I’d like to just point you to the resources that were a ton of help to me.
This link will tell you just about everything you need to know to get you’re A@H box accepting/receiving phone calls:
http://mundy.org/blog/index.php?p=62#amp
Once you get the bare necessities functioning, check out this link for fine-tuning the box.
http://mundy.org/blog/index.php?p=63
So for those of you out there who have been thinking about setting up an Asterisk@Home PBX, I hope you feel a little more comfortable about the idea. I have been very happy with mine, and know others who are just as happy with theirs. In fact, I don’t know if I could go back to just plain old analog phones plugged into analog lines anymore. Not only would I lose the ability to check the weather forecast by simply calling an extension, but also the Wakeup calls my Asterisk@Home box provides that I’ve become so reliant on!
2 Comments:
It's good to hear someone is excited about telephony platform Asterisk. There are some statements in the piece I want to react on.
Asterisk@home is not the telephony platform but Asterisk is. Asterisk@home is just a flavour with a nice gui webenabled frontend. Behind the gui it is the same as all the other flavours of Asterisk. The gui webenabled frontend is especcially usefull for the easy configuration tasks. When things get a little bit more complicated and you really want to explore the endless possibilities of Asterisk you have to edit / add to the .conf files.
The x100p cards are not top quality high end cards but there can be a lot of reasons why the sound quality was that bad but it isn't the card itself. I have sold a lot of them and never had complaints about the sound quality. Sometimes I had to help a little to get them up and running. My guess is that it was not the card but the configuration that was the problem.
Lesouvage,
Thanks for the comments.
While I spent at least a month trying to get the cloned cards working properly, it is possible I just could not find the documentation I needed. I tried adjusting the txgain, rxgain settings, and ztmonitor(I think that's what the utility is called), as well as other things I can't remember now. Do you have any tricks or tips you'd like to share on what it takes to get these cards working properly? If so, please either use our Submit Knowledge link, or post as a comment so that we can add it as a post on VoipJots so that others who may currently be in the position I was in can benefit from the information.
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