Re: The Definitive VoIP Quickstart Guide: Incredible PBX for the Raspberry Pi

I have been running RASPBX as my home phone system for over a year. It's the sole reason I bought the Pi.

It has been very successful, with only one failure when the SD card failed and refused to reformat.

Of course, even without any IP phones, a Raspberry Pi is cheap enough just for call recording, and any anti cold calling features you might want to implement:

...

Presumably to cope with SD card failure you could store app and/or data files externally. I also found this.

Does the software work with just certain brands or specific models of IP phone? I know there are stardard VoIP protocols but IIRC some Cisco phones are really cumbersome to interact with and each model requires slightly different handling.

I wondered how to attach RASPBX to the analogue phone line. As it seems to run Asterisk it looks like this advice applies.

The Obihai 110 looks reasonable.

James

CISCO SPA-301, -303, -504 are quite good, no complaint except that their internal clocks resist localisation past 30South.

CISCO SPA8000 8-way FXS work well too.

CISCO/Linksys does some little single FXO, FXS, internet router boxes that can be used with off-site VOIP providers or with on-site asterisk, I don't recall the model number.

see also Billion and Draytek. U ose a Cisco (obsolote) model with SIPGATE. Excellent.

Plug analogue phone into router, set up password and go.

Here is my setup

From the top, Linksys PAP-2 provides 2x FXS ports (for regular phones) Linksys SPA-3000 provides a further FXS plus an FXO (for my landline) Switch, to glue it all together. Oh, and a Pi on the side ;-)

Of course I wouldn't need any FXS ports if I had elected to use IP phones, nor would I need the FXO if I'd used all VoIP trunks, and I still could have kept the number by porting it to a VoIP provider.

You can also see the emergency SD card ready for action. Note they are not even and "HC" ones, I get them on Ebay for 2.76 GBP delivered.

hat

You can't. The normal analogue phone as a 4 pin plug with two wires used (t he others are ground and shield ground) You need a little digital box, whic h you could likely turn the pi into with a A/D & D/A converters and 48V to power the phone. There are things already out there to do this, the magicja ck USB is one, but not likely to work with the pi.

Er you plug the phone into the ROUTER,. No pi required.

SPA-3102 these days.

I have an SPA-301 and SPA-303 for VoIP phones. I also have the 3102 for the POTS line, and an SPA-2000 and SPA-8000 for the internal extensions on POTS.

All very nice and fairly consistent. I have a program that generates XML configs for them for download, saves messing about with the (very extensive) customisation screens.

Dude, you cannot plug an analog phone directly into a router. The router is digital, the phone is analog.

I have a router that can take 2 analog phones. Several do and act as SIP clients to an external (on internal) registrar. Draytek 'v' series is what I have, but there are many others.

Also, many of the ATAs that you can get can act as a router and have 2 Ethernet ports - providing dhcp, dns, etc. as well as giving you the ability to plug a phone in.

There are many combinations of boxes these days, but despite designing and selling VoIP system for the past 5-6 years now, I've not tried it on the Pi. Mostly because I've moved to hosted/virtual PBXs and abandoned analog entirely. There is no reason a Pi can't run asterisk, so I'm surprised people are making a fuss over it - it's just another Linux box afterall and there are plenty others more capable with the same power footprint (e.g. ALIX boards - althoug they are 4x the price!). For me, the main issue is the Ethernet interface which is via USB. VoIP needs 50 packets per second of 160 byte packets each way per call, and my concern is that for more than a small number of calls it might prove too much for the half duplex USB interface to manage (and the underlying Linux driver in the Pi) - even though on paper at 420Mb/sec it's more than adequate. Maybe I'll run my testing suite on it one day though. (But for home use, it will be perfectly adequate)

FWIW: My home/office PBX is a somewhat old 533Mhz VIA system with an internal PCI analog card taking my incoming analog phone line and providing service to just one analog phone now - used to be more, but all internal phones are now Gigaset VoIP or SIP desk phones apart from the big red phone with the dial... I did benchmark that to 50 concurrent calls but when I was selling that platform, I limited it to 25 concurrent calls max. When it dies it will be replaced with a Pi and an ATA that can handle both an incoming and outgoing analog phone.

Gordon

Probably the Pi will not work well for a large installation with 500+ phones. But for a home or a small company (say, 10-20 phones) it works just fine with Asterisk and one of the web management interfaces.

Try a ping -f. I got 1.8K packets per second. So that's 10 calls.

Er you can if it has telephone ports which mine does. Two of em.

Some DSL routers have RJ11 FSX ports and effectively have a built-in VoIP analogue telephone adapter.

For example:

Not every one wants to be forced to keep up which the latest smart-arse http!S! like those who thought they could mortgage their house for beer because the OTHER clevas were doing so.