I took a good look at my monthly bills and found that I needed to curtail them. One useless bill was my phone bill. Almost 600 bucks a year. So I decided to turn to, yes the internet, to find a low cost solution that would do the same things and more than my current Vonage setup.
There are many home PBX software solutions out there, but I chose “PBX in a Flash” based on FreePBX and Asterisk. It can run on a very low end system 1.5 GHz Pentium would do fine. I chose to use an old laptop for my Linux based PBX (Private Branch Exchange) solution.
So first step was to download and install an ISO from http://pbxinaflash.net/downloads. Burn the ISO to a CD and then boot from it.
Follow the instructions as the install will take you through basic Linux setup such as IP etc.
Once you have installed it, fairly straight forward, you will need the following:
- Google Voice Account
- Free SIP account ( I used SipGateOne residential account )
- Configure SIP phone or Software based VOIP ( I used Linksys SPA-3102 )
To be continued…
