[Asterisk-Users] Residential services

[Jesse Peterson]

It will suite you well to fumble around with asterisk for several days and to keep reading all the documentation tidbits you can find. That will really help get you aquainted with asterisk and the support/documentation that is available. Most of the good info I've found has come from the wiki and from reading through list archives.

Your dialplan question isn't too hard. I'll leave it up to you to make sure your contexts are included/excluded correctly. Basically all you need to do is make sure that
"ignorepat => 9" is commented out (so ";ignorepat => 9) in any context that should use normal dialing. Then you have 2 extensions, either this for 10 digit dialing
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1, Dial, ${OUTTRUNK}
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,1, Dial, ${OUTTRUNK}
or this for 7 digit:
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1, Dial, ${OUTTRUNK}
exten => _NXXXXXX,1, Dial, ${OUTTRUNK}

of course you are also on your own to make sure "${OUTTRUNK}" is working correctly.

I haven't done outbound to the PSTN with a Cisco setup, but I have with a Lucent setup (mvam as gk and tnts for pstn access). I've had to use OH323 channel instead of the included H323 channel. To get Asterisk to register w/ my gk as a gateway instead of a terminal. Basically, I did this:
1) setup a gateway called 'ASTERISK' on my gk (mvam)
2) in oh323.conf:
gatekeeper = 192.168.0.50
[register]
alias = ASTERISK       ;or whatever name you used on your gatekeeper
prefix = 9990000000    ;oh323 was complaining there were no prefixes registered... so a bogus one fixed that. my gatekeeper seems to just ignore it anyway.
3) in my extensions.conf, I dial to "OH3223/BYEXTENSION", so in my above 10digit dialing example, it would be:
exten => _1NXXNXXXXXX,1, Dial, OH3223/BYEXTENSION
exten => _NXXNXXXXXX,1, Dial, OH3223/BYEXTENSION

the 'BYEXTENSION' part just take the number as matched by the exten option and passed it out to the gatekeep OH323 has registered with and routes based on it's response.

Now, as far as residential services. Test, test, test. Then test a little more before you decide you can run production services. In some non-formal testing, myself and another fella using approx. the same setup (basically * as a sip<->h323 gateway) have found we could not run more than about 20-25 simultaneous calls. With typical telecom oversubscription rates, you're not going to get very many customers on an asterisk box.
If you do manage to get it to handle a decent number of calls, I'm sure many people would be interested in your configuration.


jesse


-----Original Message-----
From: Jeremy Jones [mailto:jjones at westcomllc.com]
Sent: Monday, January 19, 2004 11:52
To: asterisk-users at lists.digium.com
Subject: [Asterisk-Users] Residential services


Hi folks,

The obligatory newbie disclaimer:

"Hi, I'm new to Asterisk and I have a couple questions..."

OK, now that that's over with:

I've just started working for a small CLEC, and I'm trying to sell * to
my boss as a replacement for some expensive/inflexible/closed-source
software he's been using to provide residential dialtone with for a
couple years now.  Presently, we have:

1) a cluster of sun boxes running propriatary IP-PBX software
2) a cisco 3640 h323 gatekeeper
3) a cisco as5300 pstn gateway

I'd like to use sip between an asterisk box and that as5300 (which right
now is only speaking h323), and I'd like to be able to use sip, h323,
mgcp, or skinny for residential customers.  This ought to be no problem,
right?  I'm coming up with pretty much nil on documentation regarding
as5300 <-> asterisk configuration, however.  And, while I'm sure I could
fumble through it for a couple days, I thought there just might be
someone out there who has a working configuration using an as5300 as a
pstn gateway with asterisk (either with sip, or with h323 via a cisco
gatekeeper).

Now, regarding residential services in particular...

The configuration files & examples I've found all assume a business
environment, where you'd dial a 9 for outside lines.  Anyone have an
example config where an endpoint gets dumped directly to the pstn when
they pick up the phone?

Thnaks,
Jeremy Jones

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