[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk as a voicemail for a central office switch

[Matt Waterman]

I've spent the past several weeks reading up and playing around with Asterisk while I've been waiting for an ISDN card I got on ebay to arrive so I can really get to business. I'd just like to run my project ideaa by some of you to hopefully get a little feedback. I aplogize if this ends up being a somewhat long message.

In the Marine Corps we've somewhat recently started using Redcom IGX switches in place of the proprietary (and ridiculously expensive) switches that we've used in the past (well, and still do use). This opens the door to all kinds of off-the-shelf equipment that we can interface with. My goal now is to usefully integrate Asterisk primarily to provide voicemail and autoattendant feature and probably to demonstrate various VOIP capabilities. Ideally I would interface via a T1/E1 interface (might as well use E1 for the extra channels) but since I don't want to shell out gobs of money for what is at this point still a personal project, I'm opting for ISDN connectivity. One interface for now will give me two channels but I'll get another interface when I see more progress.

To my knowledge, the Redcom switch isn't specifically designed to be interfaced with any voicemail systems. However, it can be set up to forward calls on busy/no answer. This looks like it should be the ticket. I can set a forward number for each phone to something like xxxxyyy where xxxx will just tell the switch to follow a specific route to a group of ISDN channels. Then it'll open an ISDN connection and pass on yyy (and whatever else is needed) to Asterisk which could be used to identify the voicemail box somehow. I guess I could set up any type of extension (SIP or IAX or whatever) and since nobody would ever actually be connected to that extension, Asterisk would automatically send it to voicemail every time. I imagine autoattendant could be set up similarly.

My understanding of Asterisk is very.. limited at this point as I'm sure you can tell. But does my above thinking seem doable? I imagine I'll figure it all out eventually but any pointers that might speed up the process would be greatly appreciated!


Matt
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/attachments/20050223/96ad0472/attachment.htm