New person with a question

Hello,
I am curious about something. How does asterisk do say caller id? So this isn’t a service you have to get from the phone company but this software can also do this? I apologize if I am coming off as an idiot but I just want to make sure. I understand how it does the transfers, forwarding, email, and etc… but was unclear of this.

Thanks,
Daniel

As far as CID coming in on your pstn lines yes this has to be come from the phone company asterisk can not generate it from thin air. But say you have 2 asterisk servers connected together over a network or internet you could generate your own cid information to send to the other server. I have a pri coming from the local telco and they let me send them CID so my calls look like they are coming from different companys.

your question can be a bunch of things. If you mean recieving caller id, then asterisk needs to GET the data from somewhere. This can be the caller-id service on your phone line, or in the case of a VoIP call, the caller-id is sent along with the call data. This data comes from the extension or account number of the phone, along with a name field which is configurable on the phone itself. Asterisk can override this and set the phone’s outgoing caller id to be whatever you want. However, just because asterisk sends it doesn’t mean it gets heard. A POTS analog channel has no method of sending outbound caller ID, the outgoing caller ID is set by the phone company. Also, many VoIP providers will ignore your outbound caller ID and set it themselves. PRI channels usually let you set outbound caller ID but not always.

Does that help?