I am creating a virtual pbx for my work place but I have very little knowledge of how asterisk and other telephony equipment works.
If I create a virtual pbx and host it in a data center and have my clients(all our offices) use this machine how will the following work?
1) How will a call dialed to our office number be directed to this virtual pbx 2)if the customer dials 1(1 is set to direct calls to a mobile),who and how will it be billed because the virtual pbx will dial the outgoing mobile call?
i think you are thinking how to let asterisk handle your offcie’s incoming phone lines. you need a separate hardware interface (eg digium card or audio code gateway) to connect your telco T1 lines or analogue lines before routing the calls to your hosted asterisk.
outgoing calls to pstn (both landline and mobile) are passed through the interface equipment in (1) to your telco provider who should bill your company. asterisk itself has call detail records on incoming and outgoing calls to serve intra-company bill separation
i think you are thinking how to let asterisk handle your offcie’s incoming phone lines. you need a separate hardware interface (eg digium card or audio code gateway) to connect your telco T1 lines or analogue lines before routing the calls to your hosted asterisk.[/quote]
So I will have to contact the telco to transfer our phone line to the datacentre and connect it to hardware interface
is that correct?
I am assuming this call can also be routed through a voip gateway
This is how I understand it
customer phone ------1----Asterisk serverhosted at datacenter --------voip/pstn/mobile gateway-------2------mobile phone
1)customer charged by his/her phone provider
2)Our office charged by our phone/voip provider
[quote=“technow”]
So I will have to contact the telco to transfer our phone line to the datacentre and connect it to hardware interface
is that correct?[/quote]
Huh??? Assuming your office already has incoming PSTN phone lines you don’t have to transfer anything. You will need additional hardware to link a PSTN line to your Asterisk internal network, as dereklinrs pointed out.
If your Asterisk setup is hosted remotely (say for example you rented out a Rackspace server), all you need to do is point the various devices at the correct IP. (Almost all of this is in the book, by the way)
[quote]
I am assuming this call can also be routed through a voip gateway [/quote]
Yes.
[quote]
This is how I understand it
customer phone ------1----Asterisk serverhosted at datacenter --------voip/pstn/mobile gateway-------2------mobile phone[/quote]
An Asterisk server can either be remote or local, but this is essentially correct…
[quote]1)customer charged by his/her phone provider
2)Our office charged by our phone/voip provider
am I right?[/quote]
If you make a call out of Asterisk to a PSTN, you will be charged. If you make a call into Asterisk from a PSTN, you will be charged. If you make an Asterisk-to-Asterisk call you will not be charged, as that case has nothing to do with your phone provider.
I am creating a virtual pbx for my work place but I have very little knowledge of how asterisk and other telephony equipment works.
If I create a virtual pbx and host it in a data center and have my clients(all our offices) use this machine how will the following work?
1) How will a call dialed to our office number be directed to this virtual pbx 2)if the customer dials 1(1 is set to direct calls to a mobile),who and how will it be billed because the virtual pbx will dial the outgoing mobile call?[/quote]
If you still have little information about the basic workings or virtual PBX systems then there are many online reference that you can use: Wikipedia, HowStuffWorks, etc.