What's The Purpose Of Outbound Channels?

I have a couple of Grandstream HT-503s configured. I have the trunks and inbound and outbound channels configured. But the buttons on my SIP phones are connected directly to the trunks. I get a dial tone and can dial out.

So what’s the purpose of the outbound channel? Shouldn’t my SIP phones (Grandstream GXP2130s) connect to that instead? How do you do that?

Assuming you mean sip.conf device sections, rather than channels, I’ve never really worked that out. The only time it might make a real difference is if the peer had an inbound proxy, to which all new calls should be sent, and multiple workers, from which inbound calls could be received. I suspect it may have been a carry over from an ancient version of Asterisk

Also FreePBX may be stuck with them for some reason arcane reason of its own.

I’ve never used them in hand coded, native Asterisk, configurations.

In fact, in many cases, the matching rules for sip.conf sections end up with the supposedly outbound entry matching the inbound requests!

I’m so glad someone else is a bit unclear. Could you tell I was on FreePBX by my question? So no, not native sip.conf. All the different instructions (there are lots of them) say to create the outbound channel. But I’ve created the trunk and an extension using the same DID. It looks to me like my SIP phone is connecting to the extension which is connecting to the trunk. Okay, so back to my original question.

Maybe the high priests/priestesses of Asterisk can tell me.

You may have more luck if you visit the FreePBX oracles but it may just be part of the ancient ritual that would be heresy to break.

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Oh I light incense all over that temple. The priests and priestesses are getting kinda pissed. :slight_smile: