New to Asterisk, a few questions

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

I am a small IT provider. I am working to flesh out my offerings and also tie up some loose ends in my own business’s presentation (finish my website & sales literature, procedures, and get a phone system in place).

I’ve been wanting to learn a bit about Asterisk for a number of years and haven’t gotten to it until now. What I want to do is, load asterisk on an Amazon EC2 server (I only need 1 number atm), have a desktop softphone (advice on which ones people like the most welcome), and build a fairly simple answering system that would work like this:

  1. Call comes in
  2. greeting & music is played
  3. rings my desktop softphone and calls(I assume I would need a second sip for this?) my cellphone for X amount of time.
  4. If neither pick up it goes to voicemail, which then sends an .ogg/.mp3/.wav to my email address via smtp.
  • Ideally the voicemail system would save the audio file somewhere and call a program of my choosing with the filename as a parameter.

Is all that fairly easyish to accomplish with asterisk?

Lastly, what sip providers have people had the best experience with? I need something inexpensive, reliable, (I’m in the US).

Thanks for your help

2

Yes, it’s fairly simple, Install a linux based SO on your EC2, then install asterisk then you need to get familiar with the exensions.conf sip.conf files to configure you dialplan and your gateway.
Then use your softpone or android phone to ip Amazon has given to you and your are done.
I don’t know about latency with EC2 and your SIP provider and therefore your Audio quality. I personally prefer using a cheap SIM gateway such as GOIP.
goip images
Configure GOIP

I don’t know about SIP providers in the USA.
I hope this helps.