I’ve recently moved, and our new phone provider doesn’t offer voicemail. Voicemail was always convientient, but I am reluctant to going back to answering machines.
Our house is already wired with Cat5e and standard phone wiring. Since all of our phones are standard phones (no VoIP), I’d like to use the existing phones for my little venture.
Is it possible, using asterisk, to have the line from the phone company come into my asterisk machine, and out to the rest of the phone lines in the house and still work?
I somehow want to get a homemade voicemail system working. We also have two lines in the house, so I’d like voicemail for each of the lines. I am very new to asterisk and I apologize if this is in the wrong section or already stated in the wiki or somewhere (I looked, but didn’t really find what I was looking for).
Also, what hardware do I need besides a computer and a phone line? How might I go about setting something like this up? Thanks for your help.
The easiest way to do that would be to set up an asterisk box using asterisk@home, comes complete with voicemail and is really easy to set up.
To get the phone line going into asterisk you would need a FXO card, and if you want yoru telephones to go into your asterisk back you will need a FXS card.
You do not need a FXO card. You can also use an ATA like the Sipura 3000. Unlike a FXO card, the Sipura 3000 has pass thru. If you lose power or the server is down you can still receive calls because the signal is passed thru from one side of the ATA to the other. As far as I know, no card currently support pass thru (if someone else knows please let me know which card does, I’m willing to be corrected). The Sipura 3000 cost about $100 it is both a FXO and FXS unit.
If you get a FXO card you also need to have FXS support which will run the cost of the card up.
Awesome, thank you for your quick responses. I do have another question.
If I were to purchase the Sipura 3000, would I need any other cards in my computer? Just plug the phone in on one end, the phone out on the other and then the cable to my computer?
[quote=“revision”]Awesome, thank you for your quick responses. I do have another question.
If I were to purchase the Sipura 3000, would I need any other cards in my computer? Just plug the phone in on one end, the phone out on the other and then the cable to my computer?[/quote]
The Sipura 3000 has an ethernet connection, and 2 RJ11 connectors (line-in, phone). An no you do not need another card in your computer. As you add ‘extensions’ you may need to get another ATA. If all you are doing is adding phones and not incoming phone-lines (PSTN) then you can get a FXS ATA (such as the Linksys PAP2 dual FXS ports)
The only other things you would need to do is configure it (there is a good manual on the sipura.com web page), configure sip.conf and externsions.conf as needed.
BTW just so you know, the Sipura must ring at least once before the call can be passed to Asterisk. This is so that it can receive the CallerID. Next you must specified a default dialplan (DP) for Line 1 which will forward the call to Asterisk. And last you need to specified a DP for the outgoing phone numbers (the default one works fine). This is all in the wonderful fine manual so RFTM.
On a side note for discloser: I have both the Sipura 3000 and Linksys PAP2 in my home set-up.