New User, Set up "Call forward center", need advic

Hello to all,

I have AsteriskNow running happily on a server with an x100p (i understand these cards can be junk, using for testing for now).

I have a pretty stock setup thus far, and heres what i would like to accomplish

Asterisk answers main line for our company,

Presents Greeting, “Press 1 for residential, 2 for commercial”

Upon pressing 1 or 2, the call is then forwarded to a cell phone.

Wash, rinse repeat.

Thats it, no phones (SIP or otherwise) hooked up to the box.

Our provider here offers call forwarding that works as follows:

Answer Call --> press flash --> (dial tone) -->dial number --> hang up.

I have tested this manually and it works great, and frees the line up for the next call.

I have heard that asterisk cannot support this due to the flash part, that once the line is open, it cannot be flashed.

Looking for general advice, workarounds, or otherwise.

Our other option, from what i understand, is to buy a Digium 4 port FXO card and then have multiple lines in and outbound. But this would mean that for every call in --> out to a cell phone, 2 lines would be tied up. That can get expensive quick for such a simple scenario.

Should i be using Asterisk for this application? Is there a better way?

Any and all help is appreciated.

Scott

asterisk does this quite nicely, with the one gotcha that you must be using a zap channel. asterisk doesnt (afaik) know how to send a flash event over SIP.

from forums.digium.com/viewtopic.php?t=13460:

exten => 1,1,Goto(transfer-out,PUTYOURPHONENUMBERHERE,1)
exten => 2,1,Goto(transfer-out,PUTYOUROTHERPHONE#HERE,1)

[transfer-out]
exten => _NXXXXXX,1,Flash()
exten => _NXXXXXX,2,SendDTMF(${EXTEN})
exten => _NXXXXXX,3,Hangup()

hope that helps!