Thinking of using Asterisk - Handling Multiple phone numbers

Asterisk Asterisk General
1

I’m looking at the Asterisk demo. I’m a computer programmer and a business owner so I’m thinking I could set this up for our 2 businesses with their respective phone numbers, but I need confirmation prior to investing in setup and experimentation. I need to location the install documentation. I’ll hunt that down.

My initial questions

  1. Will any IP phone work with Asterisk?
  2. Can Askterisk handle one to many calls coming into Business A at the same time if Business B is also ringing? Here are the scenarios:

Some other cloud-based systems can do this by using Hunt Groups.

Scenaro #1
Company A receives a call, then Company A (florist) receives another call and we would like them to go on hold music while it XFR’s to the next available operator. If they are busy, forward to VM and we are notified about the missed call.

Scenario #2
Company A (florist) receives a call, then Company B (ice cream) receives a call at the same time. We would like them to go on hold music while it XFR’s to the next available operator. If they are busy, forward to VM and we are notified about the missed call.

Question: Music on Hold for its respective business?
I’m not sure MOH (music on hold ) is available for each individual business so we could record advertising/information for each business that the caller would receive while on-hold for their respective call. See below the example.

Example:
Company A (florist) receives a call and caller goes on hold and hears MOH/or information about that business. Company B (ice cream) also receives a call at the same time and caller is also on hold, but hears information/MOH for that respective business.

Thank you so much!

2

  1. Of course not. Some IP phone protocols will be proprietary. It should handle all the commonly used SIP phones.

  2. Should be able to do so although the details would need to be thrashed out, and you would need to code your own dialplan rather than relying on a GUI.

3

Thanks for your reply. I’m not a telecom guru, so I will have to heavily rely on documentation for setup. What is this called with Asterisk? Is there documentation for this type of setup? I’m on the demo site. Where can I go to see how this could be setup?

4

All this can be done with asterisk. There aren’t any case studies to read and follow. You have to to get it on your own. As for the phones just make sure that they are using sip protocol. Avoid old cisco.