Phoniness

[natbudin]

I've been setting up Asterisk at home.  It's a free, open-source PBX system that uses Voice over IP technology (VoIP).  I've set it up to support SIP, and it also interfaces to the PSTN through a Linksys SPA-3102.

"OK, Nat, what the FUCK does all that mean?"

It means that when you call my land line number (which I will post in a separate, friends-

Comments

[roguesylph]

Nice!

"If anyone has any suggestions for how to make this even cooler, I'd appreciate any and all comments."

Can you get it to do the dishes or make cheesecake?

On a more serious note, can you use it to conference call with multiple people in the house?

[natbudin]

We'll see about the dishes. I'm pretty sure cheesecake is scheduled for an upcoming release.

And yeah, conference calling is definitely in the works - I need to do some more reading before attempting that one though.

[roguesylph]

Mmmmm, cheesecake...

Oh, also: call forwarding to cell phones. Heck, you can make the caller wait through all manner of rings! 3 rings in the room, 3 rings in the public part of the house, 3 rings on a cell phone, 3 rings on the bat phone, 3 rings on a random pay phone in Ottawa (press 3 at any time to just leave a frikkin voicemail already).

[natbudin]

I actually thought seriously about cell phone forwarding. The problem with it is that if you're calling in from a regular phone number, you're already taking up our phone line, which we can't use to place a cell phone call. So we'd have to get some kind of additional phone line to be able to do that (Broadvoice, maybe).

And no, we wouldn't have to make you sit through 3 more rings - it could simultaneously ring the bedroom phone and the cell phone. :-P

[neuromancerzss]

Couldn't you make the pass-through call through the magical internets?

[natbudin]

Well, yeah, but that would require some way of calling actual phones through the magical internets. That ain't free. Hence, Broadvoice (or some other SIP->phone gateway provider).

[roguesylph]

What's the fun in making it ring in multiple places at once? What, do you actually WANT voicemails??

I was going to say it would be cool if people could leave a voicemail and then have THAT forward to your cell phone, but I suppose for at least some of your house having email forwarding is effectively the same thing.

When it forwards to email, does it include the phone number/caller ID information in the message text? So, for example, if you're reading emails on a smartphone where you couldn't listen to an audio attachment, would you at least be able to see who left a message and when?

[natbudin]

So far, it seems like it includes the caller's name in the email, and if there's no name in the caller ID, then it includes the number. Not 100% ideal, but it works.