I discovered Asterisk yesterday. I read the Future Of Telephone today. It all sounds interesting.
I would like to setup Asterisk for my home. I have one POTS line with 2 phones (one upstairs and one downstairs) that I want to use. I understand that I need to buy an interface card, probably something like the Digium TDM2400P.
What I don’t understand is, broadly speaking, is how this works.
I connect a telephone line from a wall outlet to the interface card. Ok, now what? If I have 2 phone in the house, will Asterisk somehow be able to ring either or both phones? If so, how? If I place an outgoing call from a phone, will it route thru the Asterisk app? If so, how?
Hi,
Asterisk can be configured to handle each line or trunk (line) in just about any way you can dream of.
It can work exactly as you say, with the advantage of being able to dial between extensions and, optionally, add ‘lines’ that work through your internet connection to give you extra, free, incoming numbers and cheap (possibly free) outgoing calls to many parts of the world.
I build asterisk systems & also use one myself. My standard setup is:
Centos 4.4 for the basic system
Asterisk 1.4 & Zaptel 1.4 (whatever are latest releases)
FreePBX 2.3
Plus a zaptel-compatible card for analog lines.
FreePBX is a web-based configuration system for Asterisk, it makes the whole system incredibly easy to set up and change.
You will need an interface card of some sort, the TDM2400 is probably over the top at 24 lines, you could use a TDM400 or TDM800 for up to 4 or 8 analog lines+extensions.
I use a Yeastar YSTDM800 in my own system, this supports 8 analog connections and (with it’s ‘SO’ module) automatically connects an extension to the line if the power fails, so you still have emergency phone.
You can also add extensions using ATAs (eg. Sipura/Linksys devices) - these connect back to the Asterisk system via your home ethernet and provide an analog phone socket wherever you want one.
Thanks for your reply. That did answer some questions I had but…
I fundamentally do not understand what get plugged in and how.
For example: I will plug in a telephone line to the interface card. The other end of the telephone line is plugged into the wall? Is each extention plugged into the wall also? Or are they plugged into the interface card?
Right now, I have one base station with 2 cordless phones. Do I just plug the base unit into the interface card? Does the interface card also need a plug directly to the wall?
Anyway, I hope you can see my confusion here.
I have been programming for 25 years so the programming part of Asterisk should be a piece of cake once I figure out the hardware.
Thanks alot! That clears up what I need to do at home.
If the home/test is ok, I am wanting to do this at the office which is just a little different. Before I do that tho’ I think I should read some more about telephony and pbx systems in general. If someone has a recommendation for books or websites for telephony nubies, I would appreciate any recommendations. Otherwise, I will just google it.
