[Asterisk-Users] Question PSTN->VOIP forwarding and # of inbound calls

[Rich Adamson]

> If I get a standard business line from qwest, plug it into my FXO card 
> and get the call forward busy service,
> will that allow me to handle more than 2 inbound calls?

Yes, I'm doing that right now with Alltel. Alltel's implementation
is CO-based (programmed by their techs). If you ask them to call forward
to a long distance number, who pays for that call. Might ask Qwest.

> If I can do that, then I can use that for inbound calling and switch to 
> any voip provider I want for outbound calling.

Works for us right now.

> One caveat is callerid.. I'd have to block it since the # is different 
> unless theres a way to set the name on the voip provider.
> All my outbound calls say 'Phoenix'.

CallerIdNum and CallerIdName are more difficult. Some itsp's allow you
to submit a CallerIdNumb, but I don't know of any that support a changing
CallerIdName. Part of the reason behind that is there are only about
four US database vendors that are used by the US telco's (libd database).
When a call is being completed to 234-5678, the local central office
supporting the 234 exchange will do a database dip (call) at the time
of "that" call, and the name returned from that dip is what gets
presented to the caller. You have no real dynamic control over that as
a "normal" user (asterisk or not).

If you had two pstn lines from Qwest (as an example only) and one of
those lines had a registered CallerIdName of "xxxxxx" and the other
"yyyyyy", then you can have asterisk send your itsp a calleridnum
associated with the first line and the call completion callerid will
show up as "xxxxxx". The next asterisk itsp call could set the calleridnum
to the second line, and calleridname would show up as "yyyyyy". But,
both "xxxxxxx" and "yyyyyyy" were entered (basically manually) into
the libd database ahead of time (no dynamic things about that).

Not all itsp's support the submission of calleridnum, so you'll want
to ask about it before comiting to their service.

Rich