Can Asterisk Do This?

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

I am a newbie to telephony, although an IT professional for 30+ years. I’m searching for a solution to the political robo-calls that are inevitable over the next 18 months and I’m contemplating Asterisk as my solution. But I have some general questions and I would like your advice.

My environment is a home phone line. It’s Time Warner Cable (VOIP), but after it goes through their modem, it looks like a POTS line. As features, I have:

  1. Caller-ID
  2. Call waiting
  3. Call waiting Caller-ID
  4. 3-way calling

To combat the robo-calls, I am wondering if I can:

  1. install Asterisk on a POGOPLUG or Raspberry Pi-type device (small form factor & cheap)
  2. Add a Grandstream HT503 ATA, which has an RJ11 FXO port, an RJ11 FXS port, and two RJ45 LAN/WAN ports.
  3. Configure the Grandstream to route inbound calls through Asterisk.
  4. Configure Asterisk to perform call screening:
    …a) create a whitelist of numbers to route directly through to my POTS phone
    …b) check a blacklist and present them with 3-tones of disconnected line
    …c) present all other callers with a recorded message “press 1 if you are human and not…”

And all of this while not losing the basic functionality of Caller-ID, Call waiting, etc.

It looks like my investment would be about $100…

Thoughts please? Is this do-able? Risky? Difficult to make work? Not for a telephony newbie?

Thank you,
Dan

2

Yes to all. Basic configuration not so hard.

3

I just prefer the spa3102 instead of the HT503, And digium cards as my first choice,If you are doing an investment, you must invest in good equipments and avoid cheap hardwares. that leads to unreliable results. And there is no support available from the vendors

4

Thank you for the affirmation that I’m on a track that isn’t ridiculous to attempt and the advice on using the Linksys ATA instead of Grandstream.

Do you have an opinion on the platform? I just realized that I probably would not need to get either of the tiny platforms I mentioned, if I reuse an older laptop that I have on the shelf. It’s about 8 years old, currently runs Win-XP, has 1.6 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB HDD, 10-BaseT NIC, CDROM.

And would AsteriskNOW be a good starting point, if I use the laptop? I understand that using either the Pogo or Raspberry would mean starting with PIAF.

Sorry for all the questions, but there seem to be so many options so it’s hard to see where the best starting point is (for this project).

Thanks, again!

5

[quote=“bsa492”]Thank you for the affirmation that I’m on a track that isn’t ridiculous to attempt and the advice on using the Linksys ATA instead of Grandstream.
[/quote]
I installed a Grandstream as a fax interface for a customer about 6 months ago and it has been working great. The case kind of feels cheap and the web UI is slightly ugly, but it is a better deal than the Cisco if you don’t need tftp provisioning etc.

[quote=“bsa492”]runs Win-XP, has 1.6 GHz processor, 1 GB RAM, 40 GB HDD, 10-BaseT NIC, CDROM.
[/quote]

That would run Asterisk fine, but even at idle, it probably draws at least 20 watts. A Raspberry Pi idles at under 10 watts.

[quote=“bsa492”]
And would AsteriskNOW be a good starting point, if I use the laptop? I understand that using either the Pogo or Raspberry would mean starting with PIAF.[/quote]

I’m not familiar with AsteriskNOW or PIAF, but, on either pc or raspi, I would start with Ubuntu Server or Debian. Raspberry Pi’s version of Debian has Asterisk in the repository. If you can type commands and use nano/vim, you will be OK.