What is Reddit's opinion of Asterisk?

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https://www.asterisk.org/ Free!

Most if not all deployed IP phones will need something to pull down their configuration, call management, call routing. Asterisks is free and supports a lot of different hardware (just make sure you do your research)

This is a technical setting, put in place to ensure that phone lines don't get "stuck" in a call. Long story short, it's to keep hung-up phone lines from being kept open, 3CX (VOIP company) explains it in this post.

Old analog phones used something called loop-start signalling, which basically just looked for a circuit running through the phone line to tell the FXS (the telephone service provider) that the phone was off the hook. However, this analog signaling method was unreliable, and resilience was built into the network to accommodate for these phones not properly signalling their states to the network. What you're seeing, this 4 hour limitation, is one of those mitigation technologies.

Keeping this failsafe allows them to maintain uptime in their network because 'dead' lines aren't being held open - extremely critical for still-in-use analog PSTN gateways like the one mentioned in this info page. Yes, to you, it's just another marketing term that they can spin to charge more, or another way to maintain some government standard so they can charge more, but when you go to dial 911, just be glad you don't even have to consider that some rat nibbling on a phone cable in a sewer 10 miles away is going to cost you your life.

setup https://www.asterisk.org/, get some used hardware of ebay for phone and what not.

it really depends what 'voip experience' they want though. Using a voip phone? it's the same as any other phone really. Doing the networking? Setting up QoS? Building out a voip phone system? setting up voip voicemail? there's a lot in the 'voip' umbrella.

It's one of thousands of DIDs assigned to something like an Asterix server.

Probably under multiple layers of toll fraud.

step 1: purchase thousands of cheap DIDs https://www.callfire.com/help/glossary/communications/did-numbers

step 2: install asterix https://www.asterisk.org/

step 3: toll fraud those long distance charges

step 4:

step 5: profit.

source: telecom engineer.

sure you can start at https://www.asterisk.org/ or www.3cx.com. I think you missed the point .... if you can only make 20 calls in an hour that run 5 minutes a piece and you lose money BEFORE the cost for your time and any associated costs such as servers/hosting/etc.... does it really make any sense? What if the guy stiffs you and says you didn't do a good job and disputes the payment on upwork? I think you really should consider having the person hiring you provide a phone for you to make the dials on.....

There are two open source PBXs written in C - Asterisk and FreeSwitch. You could write a plug-in, add a feature or close some bugs. You could also use either one of these as the basis for your own project.

Look into Asterisk and FreePBX. Asterisk is a open source VoiP/PBX gateway and FreePBX is a distro built around it. You'll want to look the model number of the phone up and see about flashing the Avaya into SIP mode...I think. Never worked with Avaya, only Cisco phones. Also head over /r/Asterisk/ if you have any questions. They should be able to help you out setting things up.

Start here: https://www.asterisk.org/downloads/asterisknow

While that is downloading, read this. https://wiki.asterisk.org/wiki/display/AST/Installing+AsteriskNOW

You will need IP phones that work with SIP (Yeahlink / snom/ even sisco works I believe).

You can set this up in a lab, play with it.

To achieve what you want, you can setup the individual inbound routes, point them to an IVR and/or your receptionists extension.

You could also configure an IVR option for clients to go directly to x extension or team.

For getting real calls, you will need a SIP trunk to a telephony provider like https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sip+trunk+australia&t=ffab&ia=web

Then you can accept calls and configure contexts for each extension/company however you want to do it. You could theoretically give each of them a Caller ID per company.

The convenient part of using asterisk PBX instead of a hardware (or heaven forbid as-a-service providers) is configurability with relatively moderate learning curve.

A friend and I custom built an IVR in a week using a Linux box, Asterisk (this was before Asterisk had inbuilt IVR functionality), and a digital telephony card to communicate with the phone system.

The original system cost tens of thousands of pounds, and was comprised of a cluster of unix servers. We built the replacement at a cost of £300 for the line card, and £500 for the Linux box. The week was useful for configuring the hardware, but mostly was to build the systems to allow efficient transcription of responses, and to generate new mailboxes easily.

Neither of us had done anything like it before, it was a lot of fun :)

We did this ~2004, the system is still in use today with no reported issues.

> I think I'll check out the options for free/open-source PBX servers during the holidays.

The big one seems to be Asterisk. A lot of commercial offerings are built on it. It's . . . not simple, though.

> Are there any other solutions one could use? I checked 3CX but it doesn't work with the phones we have (we have the 8841 lineup)

I think Asterisk might work: https://www.asterisk.org/

Also, if you're looking for a way forward with Cisco, I used to use these people for phone system support (Avaya/Nortel, but I am almost certain they do Cisco too): https://www.blackbox.com/en-us.

you aren't getting call forwarding without having a phone system.

You could do something like asterisk for free (software) at home.. but you're going to end up doing some voip anyway.

I don't know of anything off-the-shelf that does what you're looking for (but I'm also no expert).

I assume you'd be able to develop a system using Asterisk. But the time/skill investment might not be worth it for a small scale ad campaign.

Your best bet is probably to reach out to a few small marketing agencies to solicit pitches on what you're trying to do. Either you'll be able to ask enough probing questions or see readily what tools they use and whether you'd be able to do it yourself, or you'll find their rates reasonable and just let them worry about it.

May be some explanation in the link below. We in Canada and/or US use this terminology to join a conference call over a conference bridge:

https://www.asterisk.org/get-started/applications/conference/

A conference call is not necessarily be a bridge, but a method of connecting nodes. People started calling it simply a bridge. I hate this term myself, by the way and refer it just a ‘conference call.’

> Is there any way to use the 66 block to configure a phone system to meet the requirements.

I don't think you're clear on what a 66 block is or does based on your question. I'm not trying to be an ass by telling you this, you're simply lacking some knowledge about what they actually are and do. They're simply a punch down & cross connect point for low voltage, check out the wiki page on them and you'll see what I mean.

>can you point me in the right direction of a good PBX?

I'd suggest starting by having a look at https://www.asterisk.org/

Good luck!

Google Voice at one point was the largest server farm deployment of Asterisk, an open source communication software. Create telephony apps for IP PBXs, VoIP .. Created by Mark Spencer, also the original author of Gaim (now Pidgin)

https://www.asterisk.org/

The right way to do it would be to get an inexpensive ATA adapter to power the phone (https://www.amazon.com/Linksys-PAP2T-NA/dp/B000Q7PDW2) then connect that to a RPI running asterisk (https://www.asterisk.org/). From there you can create a dial plan in asterisk so when someone hits 1 (or whatever) it does something like play a wav file, read the current weather, news, etc.

It would take a bit of learning, but it would be way more fun to play with and you don't gut a presumably working old phone

Disclaimer: I don't know what I'm talking about

Asterisk could be a good place to start. It's an open source VoIP server where you can host your own number(s). IIRC owning and running a number requires a small subscription which will vary depending on the provider you choose.

Thanks for the antenna info. Yes, I want to sectorize and link/trunk two repeaters. ie: Repeater on trailer and truck. Maybe using my repeater to link to community repeater.

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The voting will be handled with https://www.asterisk.org/ This can be live repeat and store & forward.

Asterisk is an IP PBX. A PBX (private branch exchange) is phone system, usually for businesses. Allows you to assign numbers to extensions, hold calls, transfer, etc. All the stuff you'd expect from a business phone system. A T1 (or PRI really if its 48 channels) was a digital telecom circuit that could carry up to 48 simultaneous phone calls. This used TDM (time division multiplexing, circuit switched) before that fancy-schmancy packet switched networks you kids use today came along. A key system is like a baby PBX. Rotary phones are the phones that had the wheels on them.

I don't know much detail about it at all, but maybe it's possible to do something like this with the Asterisk PBX software.

Basically, a PBX is a small phone switch that a business would use that lets them have a bunch of phone lines and extension phones, a receptionist with a switchboard, company voicemail, and all that sort of thing.

Asterisk is an open-source software version of that. You install the software on a computer, and you can do stuff like connect phone handsets to it over a network (ethernet, etc.), connect it to traditional landline phone lines (with appropriate hardware), connect it to Voice over IP (VoIP) phone lines over the internet, connect to voice communication software (that you'd use on a computer), configure hold music, do interactive voice or touch tone prompts, etc. Basically it's supposed to be super flexible.

It would probably be a pretty involved project to get it set up the way you want, but I would bet Asterisk can do whatever it is you need. There may be an easier way, though.

Apparently there's even a subreddit for it: r/Asterisk.

>There is no free OS in this world, just Linux :)

Initially, Linux was created and distributed for free by Linus Torvalds. Over the years a community has evolved that supports the development and distribution of free software.

There are many software's that are free to use yet to customize and scale them up according to your needs, you need services of professionals or companies (that's not free). That is why the free software market is still up and running.

> Asterisk is an open source framework for building communications applications. Asterisk turns an ordinary computer into a communications server. Asterisk powers IP PBX systems, VoIP gateways, conference servers and other custom solutions. It is used by small businesses, large businesses, call centers, carriers and government agencies, worldwide. Asterisk is free and open source. Source

Compelling! I wonder what the drawback is?

I was thinking that with a VOIP provider I might be able to set up my own Asterisk server and maybe configure my own voice mail and/or call recording setup, but then I never got around to that.

https://www.asterisk.org/

Seriously, you'll be totally delighted with how much better it is in every possible way.

A few replacement phones may not be enough cost to motivate you, but it's a great choice.

This is (was) a PBX, AsteriskNow is a commercially supported linux distribution for running the [Asterisk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk_(PBX\)) PBX.
A PBX is a branch exchange for a business telephone system (something that provides the extra features like call transfers and holding.)

I agree, it appeared to me that this is an addon package for Asterisk phone server: https://www.asterisk.org/

I didn't spend much time looking into it - because as my message states I think it's a wast of time. Coincidentally, Asterisk is the system that I had to use for my client that required VOIP integration though.