Connecting your phone line to Asterisk (Setting up a PBX in your house part 3)

From the previous post, we know that in order to connect your phone line to Asterisk we need FXO ports installed. So, in this post we need to configure our FXO ports (let’s assume that we have only one FXO port here). And then, I will show you a basic dialplan for your home phone. But before that, we need to have something to receive or place a call, right? The best and easiest option is an IP phone or a softphone. I am going for the softphone option here and my choice of a free softphone would be xlite.

Setting up a PBX in your house (part 2)

In part 1, we know a glimpse of what a PBX can do. Now, I am going to talk about a free, open-source PBX: Asterisk. Even though it’s free, it doesn’t mean that Asterisk is a dummy PBX. In fact, it is a very powerful one and can offer you hundreds of features. Here are some proofs:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/012408-special-focus.html
http://www.networkworld.com/allstar/2007/112607-madera-open-source-voip.html

But before we continue, I would like to clear what I am going to do here:

Goal: Since my subscription with Bell Canada is the basic one, I don’t have a voice mail, caller id or call forwarder. Thus, I would like to connect my phone line to Asterisk. By doing this, I can have all what Asterisk has to offer for my phone. Voice mail is an example.