(Sorry for the lousy formatting: stupid blackberry) Martin wrote: My goal is to figure out how to use Asterisk for -- and how expensive the hardware and monthly service provider cost will be -- for a scenario with a small home system... A bunch of say 6 family member voice mail boxes, plus 3 or 4 family members' home businesses each having a mail box, possibly a bunch of voice menus and such in front of that.
So I guess I could focus on taking incoming calls only (from the public (eom) Martin, Welcome to taug and to the world of asterisk. You seem to have been doing your research, and you are quite correct in most of your statements. Asterisk is fully capable of providing voicemail to your family/household and so much more. One of the real strengths of asterisk is its flexibility. Onless you have other plans, I would suggest you get asterisk installed and introduce it to your household as an voicemail system first. You will require a computer running asterisk and a hardware device that connects to your Bell line, an fxo device. This can be a pci card from Digium (or one of the other manufacturers) or, another option, is a small device that is still an fxo but also has an ethernet connection, it converts the analog phone call into a SIP call and routes to your asterisk server via IP. There are a few companies selling these, I prefer the ones from Sipura, the three thousand model series (I use a spa-3000, there is the newer spa-3102 also). These devices allow you to connect three things: 1) an ethernet cable to communicate with asterisk 2) a telephone handset and 3) your telephone line. I have found them to be excellent little devices to get started. So assuming you already have a computer to run asterisk on (I started running mine on a celeron 350 mhz), you only need a little device that costs less than a hundred bucks. Once you have asterisk setup (personally I have had very good success with trixbox which is a complete asterisk installation preconfigured with lots of goodies for a dedicated computer with an excellent browser based administration gui - http://www.trixbox.org), you can easily configure it to answer the phone line after a defined number of rings and have a simple menu: press 1 to leave a message for jill, 2 to leave a message for billy, etc. The telephone you connected to the sipura device can be used to retrieve the voicemail with a separate login for each family member or a softphone or when your family is away from the house they can call in and login to their voicemail remotely. As for softphones, you can run one on any computer in your home (or on the internet if you forward some ports to your asterisk server). I like the x-lite software myself, which uses the sip protocol to communicate with asterisk. As long as the softphone uses a compatible protocol (sip and iax are the most common), you can use any one you like. Once this is all working, you can build on the system. Here are some ideas that I have implemented at my home: - each telephone in the house is its own extension, my wife can call me in the basement from the upstairs bedroom - numbers of telemarketers do not ring my phones - my phones do not ring after 10:30 except from a whitelist of family members - although I have one Bell line, multiple outgoing and incoming phone conversations can happen at the same time because I have signed up with voip wholesalers for pay as you go access - when someone leaves a voicemail, the mailbox owner receives an email (sent to the sms email address of their cell phone), with the callerid, time stamp and duration of the call - when someone makes an outgoing call my asterisk server chooses the lowest cost method of routing the call, if it is a local call and the Bell line is free the call is made on the Bell line otherwise the lowest cost voip wholesaler This should give you some ideas. Feel free to ask the group for some more specifics as you'll find some very knowledgeable folks on this list. Have fun. Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network
