Asterix/VoIP/PSTN Questions - Help Please!!

seedubya

Howdy all,

I'm in need of some assistance/advice with the following. All help gratefully accepted.

I have the following setup in my office.

1. Fixed wireless Broadband - Clearwire (2 MB / 256k)
2. VoIP service with 2 lines(?) (http://www.blueface.ie/products/business.aspx)
3 different geographical numbers from Blueface, 059, 0404, 0402
3. Linksys PAP2-NA, only one port enabled, with DECT base unit connected.
4. 1 Eircom PSTN line/number due for transfer from another premises (059 prefix; was going to port to Blueface, but eggs/baskets!!!)
5. 2MB/128KB BT DSL on the above line (whenever eircom get their act together)

What I NEED to acheive is the following:

PBX. (Already have Asterix@Home installed but not configured on a P3 box)
4 internal Extensions
Icoming calls on the 059 VoIP and numbers routed to one line.
Incoming calls to all other numbers routed to another line.
Transfer calls between extensions.
Call forwarding on all numbers if busy/unanswered/broadband down, first to extensions, then voicemail.
Outbound calls routed by type of number dialled, i.e. landline calls go out via VoiP, mobile calls via PSTN etc.

What I would LIKE to achieve;

Aggregating my 2 broadband connections and using QOS to route my phones while still allowing fairly robust downloading.
Allowing for the failure of one of the broadband connections
Calender dependent voicemail, i.e. different voicemail messages for different times

I'd like to set this up myself, I'll buy any necessary equipment.
Am I crazy??

TIA

Colm

liamo

I will have to pass on the agregating of your connections - not my area.

If you're putting your own router together, QOS should be fairly straightforward to setup. Otherwise, you'd need to get a router with a QOS feature.

Asterisk should be able to handle the rest with one exception.

Call forwarding on all numbers if busy/unanswered/broadband down

If your broadband is down, incoming VOIP calls won't ever reach you so there'll be nothing to forward. They will probably go to voicemail at your VOIP provider if that's what they're set up to do.

If you want to handle incoming PSTN calls you'll need to get a piece of hardware - from Digium or elsewhere. I have the developer's kit (details here) which will give you an FXO (landline) and an FXS (alanogue phone) port which works well for me.

Regards,

Liam

Blaster99

I presume you've made some number of calls over the Clearwire connection. Do you find it acceptable? I have used it, and I found it to be fairly poor from a VoIP perspective. In fact, not acceptable at all. If you find it ok, then I would recommend you to run all your voice traffic on it and keep the ADSL line for everything else. That simplifies the setup significantly.

I have a not totally dissimilar setup except we use IP phones so we get all the call transfer functionality (and stuff like conferencing) without having to use Asterisk. I have an eircom 5M/512k connection that I use for this with QoS setup. I only use the Clearwire connection for backup. My router does automatic failover.

liamo

Blaster99 wrote:

we use IP phones so we get all the call transfer functionality (and stuff like conferencing) without having to use Asterisk

Hi,

A question for you, if you don't mind. If you're not using Asterisk, does this mean that your IP phones are connecting directly to your VOIP provider? If so, when you call one extension from another, isn't the call going out to your provider and then back in to the other phone? How do you find the performance with this? (Or have I mis-understood your setup?)

Regards,

Liam

Blaster99

It performs as well as any other VoIP. We very rarely call each other internally. About as exciting as it gets might be the odd 3-way call and there is some latency obviously. I think you'll end up needing IP phones whether you have Asterisk or not, if you want to be able to do call transfers etc. I don't think a basic phone really works sufficiently well in a business environment. In principle Blueface (or much any other VoIP provider) hosts Asterisk for you so from a functionality perspective you're not gaining much from hosting it internally, other than significantly better performance on internal calls. I took the view that it was not worth the hassle.

Blaster99

Sorry forgot to mention this, but Clearwire don't seem to traffic shape/block IAX so if you use IAX between yourself and Blueface then you can run whatever codec you like. Otherwise you're limited to G.729.