Your Own VOIP/SIP Phone System

This is about how to get free domestic (US and Canada) phone service that will let you make and receive free phone calls from anywhere in the world, including your cellphone. You also get a full-featured, flexible phone system that gives you voice mail, voice mail to email, fax (incoming and outgoing), “smart ringing,” call forwarding, interactive voice response, conference calling, remote extensions, video conferencing and just about every other feature of a complete business phone system. It’s not complicated (well, only a little complicated) and requires a total hardware investment of as little as $100.

I’ve been doing this for several months now, and I’ve been using this system for over a year. I’m not an IT guy and, though there were some initial challenges, once I worked them out, the system has been working flawlessly. The voice quality meets or exceeds standard landline phones.

If there’s enough interest, I’ll post specific details for each aspect of the project.

Here’s what you need to do your own:

Internet Service As long as you have an internet connection you can set up a system like this. The bandwidth demands for VOIP (Voice Over IP) are low, so you don’t even need a particularly fast connection.

FreePBX This is free, open-source software that provides a graphic user interface for configuring and managing Asterisk, a free, open-source PBX software. FreePBX with Asterisk is available here: https://www.freepbx.org/ The “distro” is downloaded and burned to CD. Let a computer boot from the CD and it will install and configure both Asterisk and FreePBX.

Computer FreePBX runs on a standalone computer (it’s a Linux system). Very little computing power is required. I’ve run my system on an old laptop and a thin client. Currently, I’m running it on a cheap “super slim” desktop. All it needs is a hard drive, a CD drive, minimal memory (4 Gb is plenty, and it can run with as little as 1 or 2 GB) and an ethernet port. I bought a refurbished machine for $89, delivered, that works perfectly.

You can also use a Raspberry Pi 2, a $40 computer that’s roughly the size of a pack of cigarettes. It’s available on Amazon and here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products...-pi-2-model-b/ There is version of FreePBX for it that is available here: http://www.raspberry-asterisk.org/

SIP Trunk This is the gateway to the world-wide phone system. Trunks are available from a variety of providers. They give you a phone number (or you can port an existing phone number), called a DID, and an IP address to which you point your FreePBX (or your SIP phone). SIP service providers charge for this service, usually around $20/month (Vonage is an example of a SIP service provider). HOWEVER, Google’s Google Voice service works with FreePBX and is completely free for US and Canada domestic calls. Google’s rates for international calls are very, very reasonable – for example, I pay less than 2 cents a minute for calls to China.

SIP Phone SIP is a communication protocol used for VOIP (Voice Over IP). SIP phones are readily available everywhere (I like Grandstream’s phones, but any SIP phone will work). You can also get inexpensive adapters that let you to use standard analog phones (called POTS for “Plain Old Telephone System”). New SIP phones range in price from $40 or so up to several hundred dollars. The Grandstream phones that I use range from $90 to $150 or so.

and/or

SIP Client The SIP client lets you make and receive calls right from your computer. I use a free program called Zoiper, available here: http://www.zoiper.com/en

SIP Phone App The app lets you make and receive calls from cellphone. The SIP app uses your data, not your call minutes. Zoiper has free apps for Android and iPhone.

Though setting up a system like this is not as simple as just plugging a phone into the wall, it’s not rocket science, either. It should be doable by anyone whose understanding of computing goes beyond, “it’s magic.” FreePBX is very powerful and can provide everything from a simple “phone and answering machine” to a complete 1,000+ phones business phone system. When it’s first setup it may seem intimidating but, as with other powerful software, you only need to work with subset of its available features.

As I said, if there’s enough interest from FTers, I’ll do more posts explaining each aspect of this system so people can set up their own.

NOTE: I have no financial interest in any of the products and services mentioned. I just thought I could short-cut some of the learning process that I went through when I set up my own system.