Jason O’Grady{#14763} introduced me to the Skype-like Gizmo Project by the folks over at SIPphone.
I’ve been a Vonage customer for a couple years now, so I’ve had a chance to get familiar with VoIP, and I’m looking for a good Bluetooth headset so I can try Gizmo and Skype (and others), but I got to wondering what more I could do.
Asterisk is an open source PBX application that runs on Linux, MacOS X, and others. The features include voicemail, voicemail to email, conference calling, call recording, music on hold, and a lot more. The OS X port is by Sunrise Telephone Systems Ltd, and it looks like they did a good job with it — they claim a packaged ten second install.
Ten second install or not, the complexity with a PBX is in the configuration. That’s where VoIP-Info.org comes in. They’ve got deets on how to route calls to route calls to VoIP systems like Skype and Gizmo and lists of VoIP service providers so you can make outgoing calls to the PSTN.
Even with the help at VoIP-Info, this looks complex. So I was happy to find this how-to titled Replacing SkypeOut with Asterisk and a softphone. It looks like a pretty good cookbook, though I have to admit I haven’t tried any of it.
It all looks interesting…very interesting. If you get excited about phone systems.