VoIPowering Your Office with Asterisk: SOHO VoIP

Today’s exciting installment shows how to have both old-fashioned analog phone service and VoIP on the same local network, for small shops with fewer than ten analog phone lines. Scenario: you want to keep your existing analog lines, add VoIP, use Asterisk for your PBX, and have a reasonable upgrade path for future changes and additions. (We’ll get to digital services in future installments.)

Terminology
First of all let’s get our terminology straight. Now that everyone in the world has leaped onto the telephony train, telephony terminology has suffered. Terms that have long had precise, well-defined meanings are now being stretched and morphed in all sorts of new ways, to the dismay of old-time telephony gurus. While it may be impossible to stem the tide; we can at least achieve a common understanding.

Trunk
The traditional meaning is a single physical connection between switches, such as from the telco to your PBX. In these here modern times it also means any physical or logical path between voice networks.

POTS
Plain old analog telephone service delivered over copper wire pairs, like your home phone. POTS just plugs into a dumb phone and works. POTS is not the same as PSTN though they are often used interchangeably.

PSTN
Public switched telephone network; the old-fashioned telephone service we all know and love, which encompasses both analog and digital services.

Hardware
There are many possible ways to set this up. This is our example network:

• Four phone lines
  
• One Asterisk server
  
• One Digium TDM04B analog interface card
  
• DSL or cable Internet
  
• Router
  
• Switch
  
• IP hardphones

Network Architecture
The example network is connected as this fabulous sample of ASCII art shows:

Internet -> router -> switch |-> LAN w/IP phones

               |-> Asterisk server

                   ||||

                  Phone lines

You could connect legacy analog phones to the server by adding a Digium TDM40B, which has four FXS ports. (Remember, phone lines plug into FXO ports, and telephones plug into FXS ports.) These cost roughly $100 per port, which could go a long way toward purchasing some good-quality IP hardphones. So in our little example network we’ll stick with IP hardphones.

Alternatives to the TDM04B
You don’t have to use a Digium card. Other vendors make similar cards, or you might use a standalone analog FXO gateway. Plug your phone lines into it, plug the gateway into your LAN switch with an ordinary CAT5 patch cable, plug in the power cord, and away you go. These are also available as FXS gateways, if you want to keep some legacy telephones in service.

Some examples of these are the Clipcomm CG-400, the AudioCodes MediaPack MP-114-FXO and the Vegastream Vega 50. This saves the hassle of installing a PCI card and fussing with drivers. Additionally, some of them (like AudioCodes) come with a “lifeline,” or fail-over port, which means that during a power failure you’ll still have one active phone line. Most of them have nice Web-based management interfaces and additional features like compression, echo cancellation and jitter control.

Installing the TDM04B
Plug it into a spare PCI slot on your Asterisk server, just like any other expansion card. If you installed the Zaptel drivers when you installed Asterisk, you’re almost there. (If you didn’t, you need to re-install Asterisk and compile in Zaptel support.) The next step is to configure /etc/zaptel.conf. First make a backup copy of the original /etc/zaptel.conf:

# zaptel.conf zaptel.conf-old

Delete everything in zaptel.conf. If you’re using the Nano editor, just hold down Ctrl+k until everything is gone. Then copy these lines into it:

;zaptel.conf
loadzone = us
defaultzone=us
fxsks=1,2,3,4

Notice how lines are commented with semi-colons, and not hash marks. Now you can manually load the module if you like, to make sure it loads:

# modprobe wctdm

# lsmod

Module   Size Used by

wctdm   34880 0

…

Installing a Media Gateway
Follow the vendor’s instructions, since each one is a bit different.

Next week we’ll have more configuring fun, and get our little voice network up and running.

Resources
To install Asterisk with the Zaptel drivers: VoIPowering Your Office With Asterisk: Moving to the Grownup Version
Digium hardware
A couple of VoIP shopping sites:
VoIP Supply
Telephonyware.com
The TDM400 documentation, or the README in your Zaptel source directory tells the module names.

Adapted from voipplanet.com.