Asterisk
August 23, 2005 | In: Technology
Title: telephone
Uploaded By: pkeleher
So, I’ve finally decided to ditch Vonage. The service itself has been pretty good, but I’ve been disappointed with my inability to contact their customer support and the totally crappy Linksys WRT54GP2. The damn thing doesn’t work well, at all. There’s a constant squelching noise on the line, which one can supposedly fix by shorting out two wires on the second phone port, and the wireless service just plain sucks, especially if you enable WPA. It is a huge pain in the ass to work from home and have the wireless constantly conk out.
After geeking out with friends and attending a TechPoint discussion, I decided to roll my own Asterisk server. I signed up for a BYOD account with BroadVoice (which has great rates) and installed Asterisk@Home on an old, spare computer.
While trying to get everything working, I found that my Linksys WRT54GP2 was causing problems with incoming phone calls. A call would actually come through to Asterisk and ring my extension, but the other end of the phone call would get a busy signal. Removing the WRT54GP2 from the network solved the problem. I replaced it with an old NETGEAR MR814, which works just dandy, for now.
Asterisk@Home is a pretty decent distribution and the configuration files are invaluable, but I am not a fan of Linux and would prefer to run Asterisk on an already-built FreeBSD server. Once I move the configuration to Marklar (my main server here at home), I will proceed to put pfSense on the former Asterisk@Home system. I’m going to need some good QoS to make sure that my phone calls remain clear, and I’d like to have 802.11g access again.
I also need to order an IAXy, which is an IAX (the native Asterisk VOIP protocol) gateway that will allow me to connect a regular telephone up to my BroadVoice account.
At some point, I think I’ll post an article with my configuration files so that others can easily get BroadVoice and Asterisk working together. It isn’t that hard, but I had a difficult time figuring it out because there’s a lot of outdated informatin out there, so I think I’ll try to do my part and contribute to the community.
