Freeswitch for SOHO use (success stories or comments)
-
Hey, just curious if anyone that has setup pfsense for soho users using cable/fios/dsl connections. Did you have any issues with the provider. What equipment or setup are you using? I was going to test it at my home and figured from reading all the posts I would just need a pfsense router w/freeswitch, a soft phone or a ip based phone, an account with a SIP provider to route calls and give me a phone number. Is that all or am I over simplifying things?
Thanks,
Al H.
-
I'm the developer of the FreeSWITCH package I have 7 systems that I personally manage at the moment many of them SOHO. I've also helped many people get FreeSWITCH running from their pfSense machines.
The provider I use is flowroute.com. I like them because you sign up, make a payment and pick a DID and you can use it within minutes and they are stable. Its a per minute provider but also has a plan for unlimited inbound. They allow as many lines as your bandwidth allows at 1 cent a minute per call. You can even send them your own caller id info.
I use a Linksys SPA942. Which is a great phone for the price. It even supports voip encryption TLS and SRTP. Best place I have seen to get the SPA942 is http://www.ipphone-warehouse.com/. I've also used adapters like the Linksys pap2t which can convert voip extensions work with standard phones like a cordless phone. Lately been interested in trying a something other than the PAP2T because it doesn't support the ILBC codec which is very compressed and saves bandwidth looking at the Grandstream HandyTone HT-286 which does support ILBC. I haven't tried it yet but looks promising.
I would like a new snom820 even more but it is triple the price and unfortunately not yet in my budget.
The FreeSWITCH package on pfSense is relatively new but already has many advanced features such as an auto attendant. Example: Thank you for calling if you know your parties extension you can dial it at any time… " You can make your own recordings and set up as many options as you want. What many people don't know is that most auto dialers from call centers cant get past the auto attendant. This means all your sales calls disappear unless the call was hand dialed by a real person. Goodbye annoying sales calls.
There are many of benefits for home or office. Give it a try! The documentation is available at: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/FreeSWITCH