Going Digital for Phone Service
Today we have a guest post from James Torres, of Indialantic, Florida. James is using VOIP, landlines, cell phones and all with an open source computerd based PBX program. It sounds fascinating. Take it away James:
Let me preface this by agreeing in advance that I am a total geek. When I started my own office I was looking for a phone system. My original office was in a shared office suite but I did not want to have anyone answering my phone that I did not pay directly and that I could not fire.
I like to work from home whenever possible so I wanted the ability to get calls at home after they have been screened by my secretary. Naturally I googled pbx’s and voip and came up with a program called Asterisk at Home. This is an open source PBX program that you download and use an old pc and it turns it into an unbelievably powerful office pbx system.
I found a guy on ebay who bought up old computers and put the asterisk system on them and gave you some time for consulting to configure the system for you. It cost about $400 initially to set up including a couple of phones. Over the past year and a half I have upgraded to a newer version know as Trixbox (www.trixbox.org) put in a faster computer (old one blew up in a lightning strike) and added 5 more extensions to the phone system.
My system has the following features: two bellsouth lines, about 6 IP phone lines and unlimited extensions. I have conference calling ability (up to 8 at a time); transfer in and out; DISA (direct inward system access); voicemail comes as email; IVR (press 1 for torres; press 2 etc); ability to use software phone extensions (that is how my laptop has an extension); follow me extensions (try my office, then my home, then my cell, etc.).
The phones that we use cost about $90 and have 4 lines and speed dial, speaker phone, headset jack and extension lights that show when my assistant, my receptionist, my wife, etc are on the phone at a glance.
From my home office I can see when the phone is ringing. I have a popup on my screen that tells me the number of the incoming phone call and I can hit a button and grab the call. I can hit a key combination and record phone conversations. I can hit a key combination and dictate a memo to my assistant from home and it shows up in her email inbox in about 1 minute.
I can automatically dial all calls that are on my calendar or in an outlook contact or on a webpage. All outgoing phone lines provide the same caller ID of my main phone number regardless of which line is being used. It does wake up calls, telephone reminders (call a number and leave a message for yourself at any phone number in the world and it will call you at the specific time and deliver the message – or use it to call your clients and remind them of appointments and such); local weather; call logging (list of all phone calls, times, numbers, extensions etc); call billing if you want; and a million other features I can’t even remember.
We run my office, my wife’s mediation business and a property development company off of the phone system. Each company has their own greeting, voice mail system, extensions etc. I have an 800 number for my property business that costs $1.50 per month plus 0.019 per minute. Spare rollover lines are about $1.50 per month and 0.01 per minute so you should never get a busy signal calling my office. Long distance is about 0.01 per minute in the US if I use a voip line or 0.05 if I use Bellsouth.
Oh yeah, I have a cellphone extension as well. I have a family plan and for $10 per month I added another number. I can use my cell phone to call the office or vice versa and it does not use minutes.
The cell phone extension only accepts calls from numbers that I add to a whitelist. Calls to all cells that are part of the family plan are automatically routed to the cell phone line.
For hurricane protection we now have quadruple backup. Bellsouth lines first, Internet (voip) lines second, office cellular line third and in the event all of them are down, all calls are automatically forwarded to my cell phone or my assistant’s cell phone. If I need more backup than that, Melbourne and Indialantic would have ceased to exist and I would have bigger problems.
As if that was not enough, I am now just working out the bugs on having my cell phone (tmobile DASH) act as a extension. When I go home or in the office or anywhere I have wifi access, my cell automatically logs in as an extension of the phone system so all my calls are made out through the office system unless I specify otherwise.
When I was in Europe I would just find a wifi hotspot and start making phone calls from my cell phone with a local number in Melbourne. Between terminal server (remote desktop), the phone system and my laptop I did not miss a beat while I was out of the office for 17 days.
If I had to pay for all the equipment today and build a new system it would cost about $700 for the pc and telephone interface and $90 each for as many phones I want. I highly recommend this system to anyone running a small to medium size office.
The only caveat is that you must have a stable and reasonably fast internet connection. Bellsouth DSL worked great and Roadrunner cable is pretty good. You also need a good router or QOS (quality of service) device at each location so that you can prioritize voice calls over your staff sending around the latest Youtube video or a big download.
Thanks for the advice James. I’m going to look into that and move to a digital PBX program myself.
Asterisk is great! What does the author use for for screen pop software? We use IdentaPop Pro (www.identafone.com) which works well with the free tapi drivers for Asterisk.
I use a program called Urang II which was written by Ward Mundy (a lawyer) of www.nerdvittles.com fame. Here is the link to this simple little program. http://nerdvittles.com/index.php?p=162. If you are not already reading Nerdvittles.com I highly recommend it. Lots of neat applications and ideas for using your asterisk/trixbox system.
I've been using asterisk a while. Take a look at LinuxMce, you can use it with your entertainment center and security system.
http://linuxmce.com/
