My new cell phone is costing more than my old one. I think that is because Nextel charges more than T-Mobile for data. Anyway, I needed a way to talk with my parents and brother that did not chew through my cell phone minutes. Enter
Asterisk.
I compiled and installed Asterisk on my local file server, a Celeron 400 system running Ubuntu. After much research and poking, I was able to talk with my brother for a few hours without draining my cellphone account or battery.
The Celeron is too slow to reliably transcode MP3s for music on hold, so I manually converted some songs to µlaw. That helped performance a bit, but I can still hear a stutter every time Asterisk writes debug info to the screen.
Current setup:
X-Lite for softphone
TRX Telecom for inbound calls
TelaSIP for outbound calls
Inbound calls go into a queue (just for fun) and ring the softphone when it is not on
DnD.
Inbound calls work fairly well. I still need to tweak preferred codecs and
QoS on my router.
Outbound calls don't work so well. I must not have
NAT traversal working properly in my softphone.
From what I've done so far, I much prefer Asterisk to the CallManager 3.2 install that I babysit at work. Asterisk is easier to configure and more flexible.