EDIT – these test numbers are no longer functional

As a quick demonstration of what you can achieve with Trixbox in a couple of hours I have put together a demonstration phone system.

Trixbox uses Asterisk and FreePBX to provide a richly featured phone system that you can do lots of interesting things with.

For the demonstration I created a phone system with DDI numbers in the London and New York. These phone numbers are provided by future-nine.com.

If you would like do give it a go you can call the system using the following regular telephone numbers -

• UK  xxxxxxxxxxxx
• US  xxxxxxxxxxxx

The system comprises an automated voice menu with the following options -

• Press 1 – for some music.
• Press 2 – for a speaking clock that reads the time in the UK.
• Press 3 – for an echo test. This will echo back everything you say to it, giving you an idea of the delay on the line.
• Press 4 – to leave a voicemail. This will then be e-mailed to me as an e-mail attachment.
• Press 5 – for some current news. This is produced by downloading the latest rss news feed from Yahoo and then converting it to speech using software from Cepstral. It’s certainly not perfect but gives an idea of what is possible. The audio is updated automatically every hour. The main IVR menu speech was also created using Cepstral.

The whole process from ordering the phone numbers from future-nine, to having a functioning phone system, took only a couple of hours and the only part that is not possible to perform via the web gui was downloading and converting the news feed.

As FreePBX forms the basis of most of the Asterisk distributions is just as easy to do the same with Trixbox, Elastix or PBX in a Flash.

Please give it a go and add a comment below to let me know how you get on.

If you’d like more information about virtual PBXs from Sysadminman then click here

“PBX in a flash” has been added to the list of options you can now choose from on a Sysadminman VOIP VPS. This is in addition to the Trixbox CE, Elastix and Asterisk/FreePBX/A2Billing templates currently available.

See here for more details

A2billing is a great open source billing application that can be used with Asterisk for calling card or wholesale billing

The current release of a2billing is version 1.34 but there are a lot of new features going in to the next release – version 1.4

Some of the new features include -

• All of the configuration is now stored in the database  (rather than a2billing.conf)
• Configuration is now editable through the web interface
• New callback module developed in Python
• New agent module
• New auto-dialler module
• Interface is tidier and simpler
• Uses Asterisk ‘realtime’ so no more generating SIP/IAX2 configuration files
• and more …

If you would like to have a look at this development release it is now possible to order a Sysadminman VOIP VPS with it already installed.

The cost is the same as for the Standard Sysadminman VPS – see here for details. For more information please contact us

* Please note that a2billing version 1.4 is a development release and it is not recommended to use it in a production environment. VPSs can be converted to a template running the stable release of a2billing at any time.

When I setup my ratecard here I only created 1 rate to Leicester in the UK. Ok for testing but not much use in the real world! So how are we going to enter all of the rates we need – the answer is to import them. Many ITSP (Internet Telephony Service Providers) publish a rate file that you can download. I’m going to use the callwithus (my provider) rate file that you can download from here.

Continue reading ‘Getting started with A2Billing — Part 5 Importing a ratecard’ »