Diy phone system installation

Installation will go easier if you a use newer hardware and b have some experience working in Unix environments, particularly with the Command Line Interface. This is a lot like how most home routers and firewalls are set up. At first glance, Asterisk and its many varieties offer a very attractive choice.

On-site hardware PBXs are expensive, with price tags often reaching the thousands. The chance to put together a comparable system for the cost of an old PC is one many find appealing. Though you may not run into the same problems we did, you can probably expect to hit a snag or two when installing. For the most part, they speak very little of these problems. There are many alternatives for those who want an Asterisk PBX, but want to avoid the installation process.

You can buy off-the-shelf servers that come with versions of Asterisk pre-installed. Digium, the company behind the Asterisk project , would be the best place to start shopping for alternatives. Ultimately, what Asterisk offers more than most other PBX solutions is flexibility. It gives users much finer control over basic and advanced call-handling functions. The deciding factor for most businesses, then, is whether or not they need that extra control. In our experience, from speaking with many businesses about how they use their phone systems, most do not.

In fact, many small and mid-sized businesses choose to skip the hardware PBX altogether. There are a great variety of cloud or hosted PBX business phone services that offer basic and advanced calling, forwarding and conferencing functions.

And some of these cloud-based PBXs are actually built on Asterisk. So, should you DIY your business phone system? Probably not, unless you have the experience and time needed to implement it smoothly. A more practical solution—the one we recommend—is to try one of the many cloud-based PBX phone services first. What Is Asterisk? How Do You Install It? Here's how to set up your account in less than an hour, with no tech support reps involved.

OnSIP was built for people who hate waiting. We offer a complete cloud phone system that takes less than an hour to set up, and it's all DIY. There's no extra hardware required—and desk phones are optional. All you need are your laptop, mobile phone, or tablet! It only takes 6 steps to set up an OnSIP phone system. To get started, simply answer a few questions and create a password to open your OnSIP account.

Once you sign up, you'll receive an account activation email. Click on the "Activate" button to proceed to a series of pages that look like this:. To add or modify the users you added, click on the "Users" tab. Here, you can enter the information for all the new users you wish to add to your OnSIP account. You can also assign each person an internal extension. By default, the admin user is assigned the extension , so all additional users are auto-assigned extensions starting with You also have the option to create your own extensions if desired.

Once you have entered your team's names and email addresses, you will be asked to confirm the list of users. Each user will then receive a welcome email containing their account information and instructions on how to log in to the OnSIP app , our free business softphone for Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS. The next step in setting up your business phone system is to create groups.

A ring group is a simple way to organize your team. Typically, businesses group users by department, such as Sales, Marketing, and Support. Ring groups make it easy for callers to reach the right destination when listening to your phone menu.

With OnSIP, a group is limited to 10 users. Ironically now that most of us do not use our wired telephones it is now embarrassingly easy and inexpensive to set and use systems that, not too long ago, would cost thousands and require staff to maintain.

Mmm cookies For my network, I collected the following:. I really don't have any use for a traditional landline account but it is important to know that even if you do not have telephone service active on your landline it does still work for emergency calls. My particular PBX happens to have three outside lines. So I use one outside line to connect up to the old landline for Though the only time I ever called, I got a busy signal, of course.

Next time I'm going to try For daily use, what actually makes more sense these days is a voice over ip gateway. I have an inexpensive voip gateway connected to the PBX's principle outside line. This allows people to call the PBX from a traditional telephone number and allows me to make calls around the world at effectively no cost.

These boxes have gotten very inexpensive and well integrated into all sorts of nice internet based phone services. As you can see from the photos, getting the PBX to use the VoIP Gateway is as simple as connecting a short modular cord from the jack on the back of the gateway to the first outside line on the PBX. You can complicate things by setting up what to do with incoming and outgoing calls in very great detail via your PBX's settings. However, these cheap PBX's come default from the factory to route any incoming call to ring all of the extensions, and to allow any extension to dial out on any outside line.

I do not have any reason to change this behavior, so set up here was super silly simple. The EXT lines act like a traditional telephone jack. They provide power, ring, voice, fax, whatever just like a real phone line would. At this point you can provide power to your PBX and you have just set up your own private telephone system. If you pick up one phone and dial the ext number of one of the other phones, it should ring normally.

Congratulations, you now have the coolest and most over engineered string and two tin cans intercom system ever! Note: You absolutely do not need a voip gateway for any of the internal PBX functionality to work. You can dial extensions, transfer calls, party line, and put your significant other on hold all while blissfully disconnected from the outside world.

On my PBX I can very easily make every single phone in the house ring from mine. This is perfect at dinner time when you want to let every one know. So there is the basic set up. To wrap up, let's take a moment to talk about a few fun projects that having your own PBX enables.

A red 'hotline' phone. If you work from home and have kids, this is a great way to let them know that they can always reach you while you are in your office but with just enough of a 'it has to be important' barrier to keep the distraction level down.

A Raspberry Pi virtual fax machine. Even in this internet based world, you still run into situations where you need a fax machine. It is surprisingly easy to set up a Raspberry Pi to send or receive faxes. A real telephone ringer. Find an old telephone 'subset' box to connect to your PBX. Early telephones did not have a ringer inside the phone. They relied on external subset boxes with big brass bells. When a call comes in, hear that jangling ring from the good old days again.

A dial up internet service provider. Here is another one that a Raspberry Pi works great for. It's a quick "sudo apt-get install pppd", editing a few lines of config text, and you are there.

Have any vintage computers in the attic? A PBX can be the simplest way to get them on the internet.