On the road to Asterisk

I got into VoIP a couple of years ago by accident. Forever searching for a good telephone and answering machine solution, I had looked at physical PBX hardware and concluded it was too expensive. I knew about VoIP and Asterisk for a while, but didn't have the picture in my head to see how I could set it up.

Objective

Imagine having more telephone numbers than you could count on one hand. When someone asks you for your phone number you start in on a well-rehearsed script: "If you're calling between 9-5, call the office number first, otherwise call the home number first, in any case you can also try my cell number, but I might not always have it on or hear it...oh, and here's my fax number..." Your business card would need a flow diagram on the back. Not only does that make people raise an eyebrow, it also makes it much less likely they'll get ahold of you quickly, or even try at all...

Now consider the other problems involved with this many phones. "Voicemail" is a joke, but not a very funny one. Consumer technology leaves me with essentially an answering machine on every phone. This drives down my ability to respond or even listen to all the messages that are now piling up. People think they've communicated something to you and start getting angry that you seem to have blown them off, when really you just have a multiple-inbox nightmare that you're blissfully ignoring.

Of course, all these phone lines have phones connected to them. Most phones with features beyond a hook-switch take a power supply. Most power supplies take up more than their share of space on the power strip. Add to this all the same problems with powering all those answering machines. Then that all costs money in electric bills, equipment maintenance, and other hassles. We're not even going to start in on the cost in monthly provider/service fees for all those lines.

Consolidation

Right now you're probably thinking, "why not just use a cell phone?" I have this problem a lot, where people think that their simple technology scenario works for everyone. Basically, even though cell coverage is pretty good here, I was buried in the middle of concrete high-rises. Obviously if a cell phone solved my problem I would have totally done that...it didn't, it was just another number that for various reasons did not come early on the list of preferred numbers. That's just me.

Identifying the problem was really easy; I'm not stupid. What I needed was a "primary number" for voice calls that would reach me no matter where I was. Even with all my technical might, I could not envision how this could be accomplished, without getting some kind of custom business package from the telephone company...something I didn't have the budget for.

It must be something in my nature, but I am the type of guy who wants my "answering machine" to work like a full-blown voicemail system, even if I only have one mailbox. Confounded by even expensive tapeless answering machines and supposed business-grade telephone equipment, I started looking into PBX systems. Well, talk about not having the budget! Plus, that only partially solves my answering machine problem, not the other problems.

Becoming my own phone company

I'd even installed Asterisk before. I just didn't know what to do with it. So one day while I was working on solving the above problems, I ran across it again. Something clicked. I started to see how all these pieces I'd known about for years could work together to solve this problem.

As I quickly started to delve into the meat of Asterisk and VoIP, I realized my sticking point from before: I had been so indoctrinated as to how "the telephone system" worked under the iron fist of Ma Bell, that I couldn't see these limits were largely artificial. Why couldn't I take a phone call and route it to any phone, or any number of phones? If phone calls were simply a matter of bandwidth, why couldn't I have multiple channels running over a single cable? My head was spinning.

Rethinking VoIP

I was like most people—if you said VoIP, I would think Vonage, or some kind of package that you get with a cable modem that includes a Vonage-like service. I even was a Vonage subscriber for years; paying the monthly fees but not getting any use, as it only added to my above problems—because Vonage (and services like it) are just another phone company...

The story goes like this: you get a phone number and a place to connect your telephone(s). This phone line dials out and receives calls using this public telephone number. Whether it's a landline or a "VoIP" phone, it basically works like a landline. If anything, the VoIP solution gets you some voicemail features, but again only for that line. Well, that's just another mailbox to add to my woes. No consolidation is achieved in this.

As I was experimenting with Asterisk, I quickly began to realize that I now had the capabilities to be Vonage, to become my own phone company. Or rather, I saw that a service like Vonage could be implemented with the tools I now had at my disposal. If you stop thinking of it like a "phone line" and start thinking of it as a "voice channel" (that can be transported over IP)...you start seeing how the concept of phone numbers, and their dominion over us, begins to diminish rapidly.

A True PBX

Now that we have this paradigm, how do we shape it into something that has behavior? How do we use this in the real world?—you know, the one where people dial telephone numbers to call someone.

Read on to find out...

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