AsteriskIntegration

Revision 2 as of 2006-06-23 20:39:05

Clear message

Summary

The [http://www.asterisk.org/ Asterisk] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PABX PABX] system can provide impressive capabilities to Ubuntu home and business users.

Rationale

With the increasing popularity of VoIP, provision of joined-up voice services would be a major asset for Ubuntu, especially if it installed and integrated usefully out of the box. Asterisk allows seamless use of landline phones with IP telephony which is a growing requirement for small and medium size businesses.

Use cases

  • Sarah installs Ubuntu. During installation her modem/telephone card is detected: Asterisk is enabled, giving her the option of a voicemail system which sends ogg audio messages to her inbox. She is able to connect her traditional telephone handset and make VoIP calls.
  • Aku has a bluetooth headset. His home phone line is connected to his desktop Ubuntu computer. He is able to receive calls to his landline which are routed to his bluetooth headset.
  • Simon's small business is replacing its windows server. With the Ubuntu server install, he finds he is also equipped with a full-featured PABX system at no cost.
  • Raoul uses Asterisk to host a conference call which his SIP/H323 provider does not allow.

[http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/index.php?page=Asterisk+hardware+recommendations more use cases]

Scope

Ubuntu desktop and server :

  • Desktop without telephony equipment could use a mic and headset/speaker to place VoIP phone call using a softphone, such as ["Ekiga"], via the local Asterisk server.

  • Machine which have telephony hardware able to connect to [http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/POTS POTS] should provide sane default and a mechanism to hold the hand of the user in the initial configuration, like recording the voicemail greetings and configuring appropriate settings for the country/telco being used. Hardware that might be of interest for telephony include cards from Digium, Sangoma and Voicetronix, and some ISDN adapters.

Design

Implementation

Use of [http://www.freepbx.org freePBX], formely Asterisk Management Portal, for management and configuration of Asterisk would be nice. So would be the use of [http://www.asternic.org/ Flash Operator Panel] for day-to-day use.

The use IP handset (telephone that plug in a LAN using Ethernet), such as Polycom or Grandstream, would be hard to figure out since there are a lot of configuration possible. Maybe we could "can" some common configuration, or at least document, the configuration required for some of the most popular models.

Connecting analog telephone handset require a special [http://voip-info.org/wiki/view/FXS FXS] interface, or an [http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/ATA ATA] device. We could probably do the right thing with internal FXS interface and auto-configure for a regular handset, and document the configuration and use of most popular ATA, such as the Sipura/Linksys or the Digium IAXy.

Code

Data preservation and migration

Outstanding issues

References

BoF agenda and discussion

CategorySpec