One of the great things about voip is that you can make international calls at local rates.  Combine that with Asterisk/FreePBX and you’ve got the ability to make cheap international phone calls using your mobile phone.

To do this we’re going to setup DISA (Direct Inward System Access). This will enable us to ring our Asterisk server, get a dial tone and then dial back out again.

Then I will show you how you can combine this with callbacks if that works out cheaper for you.

Installing the modules

First we need to install the DISA (if it’s not installed already) and Callback modules. See part 5 for more information about installing FreePBX modules.

Setting up DISA

Now we are going to configure a DISA…

Continue reading ‘Getting started with FreePBX — Part 6 Cheap phone calls using DISA and Callback’ »

Setting up an IVR (or auto attendant, digital receptionist) is great idea for small businesses. You can have a single external number for your customers to call but then direct the call to the right department via a simple menu.

First we need some extensions to put the calls through to, then we need to record the menu the caller will hear and finally setup the actual IVR.

Configuring the extensions

Follow the instructions in part 2 to create the extensions that you need. I have created extensions for Sales, Support and Billing

Continue reading ‘Getting started with FreePBX — Part 5 Setting up an IVR’ »

Now we can make calls to regular telephone number via our trunk we want to setup a DID (Direct Inward Dial) number so that we can receive calls from people dialing a regular phone number.

For this example I’m going to use a US number from IPKall who will provide a (free) US based telephone number. However, they are only able to do this due to a peculiarity in the law in certain states so I wouldn’t rely on the numbers being available in the future. Perfect for testing though!

Singing up with IPKall

First thing you need to do is sign up for a number by visiting their web site – http://www.ipkall.com

Fill out the details as below -

Sip Phone Number – I’m going to use ’1111′ for now but I will change this once I know what DID number I’ve been assigned

SIP Proxy – This should be the ip address or DNS name of your Asterisk/FreePBX server

Continue reading ‘Getting started with FreePBX — Part 4 Setting up a DID number’ »