Asterisk: Phone Showdown

March 29, 2007 by Eric Richardson

I mentioned in my first post that I was going to be comparing a few different phones in choosing what we would build out with. We needed phones for ten employees, a break room and a conference room. I called up VoIP Supply and they agreed to send me three used phones so that I could make my choice and not pay a restocking fee returning the unchosen two.

I ordered the snom 320, the Polycom IP501, and the Linksys SPA942. When the phones came in I set them up and played around for a week or so, messing with configurations and calling between extensions. Finally last week we set up all three phones in the conference room and three of us sat down to compare features and (most importantly) voice quality. — Continue Reading...

Asterisk: Music on Hold

March 28, 2007 by Eric Richardson

I started a couple times to write grand posts about my progress building an Asterisk PBX and kept not finishing, so instead I think I'm just going to write up little things I figured out.

When I first installed Asterisk, I wanted to be able to call and hear something. Particularly I thought it would be kind of cool to use KCRW's music stream as a test music source (though it wouldn't be legal to use it as a music on hold source in production).

Vaguely following this wiki entry, here's how I got it working... — Continue Reading...

Building a Phone System: Part 1

March 07, 2007 by Eric Richardson

Monday I started build-out on a new phone system for the office. I've never done this before, so I thought it might be cool to document the process here.

I got hired by Cartifact as a programmer, but it's not exactly my nature to stick just to that. I have a penchant for thinking I can do all sorts of things, so this fall I wrote up a proposal to replace our aging, cumbersome PBX with an Asterisk system and VoIP phones. The bosses gave the go-ahead, and now here I am building a phone system.

— Continue Reading...