atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums VOIP Phones & IP PBX VoIP & Cloud Phones, Hosted PBX, General IP Phones Asterisk + Norstar

Well the only reason I mentioned it was because the Asterisk has a pretty cool ACD for routing calls but of course it needs that CID info.

That's pretty cool. That would be a good feature for sure.

Unfortunately, I don't see myself getting out of spending $100.00 for an FXS card. However, I can get the FXO for around $25.00 This kind of sucks at this point. I'm not sure about it, but im wishing that the features were all available to the lines and not the extensions. LOL

For Asterisk, the cheapest FXO you can get is the X100 clone. It doesnt always work right, and is frequently to blame for a number of 'odd' issues; I would never use it for anything important. But they work decently well, most of the time. This costs about $10-20/card, each card has one port. (the X100 clone is a rebadged voice modem, thus the two physical ports on the card. It's a one channel card.)

The cheapest FXS you can get is an ATA. This is harder to configure much of the time, but a cheap ATA (linksys pap2-na) is about $60 and has 2 ports ($30/port).

If you want to add features to your PBX then you need to dedicate a few ports (FXO or FXS, both will work depending on how you set it up) for a trunk between * and your PBX. What happens next will determine how you set it up.


FXS port on * to FXO (line) port on PBX-
In asterisk, put your FXO ports in a context (using zapata.conf). Then make this context in extensions.conf, and put into it exten's that can do things you want, like this:
exten => 1234,1,AGI(wakeup.php) ; (calls the wakeup.php agi script if you have it)

If you watn * to be able to call back, you will have to setup DID for the ports * is connected to. If set up correctly asterisk can dial the channel then send the dtmf to dial the exten...
IE

exten => _XXXX,1,Dial(Zap/g1/,,D(${EXTEN})) ; rings a port in zap group 1. When it's answered, sends as DTMF whatever extension was dialed. Matches 4 digit extensions.

Hope that helps even if this thread is old...

Wow thanks IronHelix . When I get around to doing this I'll do what you said.

You know a lot about asterisk judging by your more recent posts!

Thanks again.