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Need help/ideas for setting up a VOIP system in my house

A.Nonymous

A.Nonymous

Extreme Android User
I cut the landline off a few months ago. I don't miss the bill. I don't miss the calls from telemarketers. I do miss being able to pick up the phone anywhere in the house. Now I'm stuck running around the house looking for my cell phone when it rings. I'm fat and lazy and really don't need the exercise. It's unAmerican.

Anyway, I want to wire up a VOIP system for my house using my Google voice number. In a perfect world, someone would call my Google Voice number and I could pick it up on the cordless phone in my house, on my cell, or on my computer without having to pay for a landline. I have phone jacks already there in my house. I could easily crawl up in my attic and run wires for data jacks. I'm a computer tech so I have the skills and equipment for this project. My house is small enough that I could easily do this on a weekend if I was motivated enough. Are there any free services/products that would let me accomplish this? I'm willing to pay a reasonable fee for said products if necessary, but I really don't need an expensive NBX switch or the like. I could buy one and configure it, but it's really not necessary for what I'm wanting to do.
 
For using plain-ole telephones, free wont cut it.

You'll need at least ONE ATA for the house. This will be located near your router, or it will need it's own network drop. Then, pop up either a VM running your Asterix choice (FreePBX, Vanilla Asterix, Trixbox, etc).

Then you can set up the ATA to register with the SIP server you popped up. Configuring the Asterix box will take much longer than a weekend, however :)

Or, you can use pbxes.org, which moves the PBX out of your house (There is some latency). It's free for less than 2K minutes per month, and your individual phone calls will get cut off at 60 minutes. You can use SIPDroid to do the initial configuring to tie in Google Voice as a voice trunk.
 
My thinking was I could use VOIP with all of the NBX stuff done out in the cloud. I would drop data lines to where my current phone lines are and use some sort of adapter to plug the phones into data jacks. But I honestly don't know enough about VOIP systems to know if this is even possible. I'm a computer tech and my knowledge of VOIP is enough to be dangerous.
 
A.Nonymous said:
My thinking was I could use VOIP with all of the NBX stuff done out in the cloud. I would drop data lines to where my current phone lines are and use some sort of adapter to plug the phones into data jacks. But I honestly don't know enough about VOIP systems to know if this is even possible. I'm a computer tech and my knowledge of VOIP is enough to be dangerous.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's doable. However, not all of the cloud PBX'es out there will do Google Voice trunking (Trunks are what calls come in and out of). pbxes.org will do it, easily.

And yeah, if you don't mind dropping data lines where you want your phones, it's easy after that. You just need ATAs (Analog telephone adapters) at each of your phones, or buy SIP phones, no ATA needed there.

Cheap ATA's are out there, I bought one of these: Amazon.com: Grandstream HandyTone HT286 VoIP Phone Adapter: Electronics

Works great, and it's been running for about 1 month thus far.

The nice thing about cloud-based PBXes is that if you lose your internet connection, calls can be sent to voicemail still, or redirected (If you have enough trunks). If you trunk right into your house, if your internet goes down, the phone call will just ring and ring.

Since you've already killed your home phone, nothing lost here, and just something gained :) The nice thing about dropping an ATA at each phone is that each phone is now an extension, which has benefits.

If you don't want to do an ATA at each phone, a single ATA with a network drop at the spot where your demarc point (Demarcation point is where all of the phone wires in the house branch off) is and then they call, it just rings all the phones in your house. Just like you had a normal phone line with a lots of phones in the house.

And, you can still set your cell phone up with a SIP client, and set it to ring your cell too.
 
My thought with Google Voice was that I would set up whatever PBX number I got as a line that Google voice forwards to. People call the GV number and it rings my cell and my PBX number like it's supposed to. I then don't have to run all over the house looking for my cell. I can simply pick up the cordless that's next to me or the phone in the kitchen or whatever phone I happen to be close to.
 
I would like to setup VOIP service in my house too, but I am not as computer savy as most on this board.

What service would people recommend?
 
I was thinking about setting this up as well as I'm starting to do quite a bit of telecommuting. With this virtual PBX software, can it be tied to Google voice and still have the advantages of a PBX, IE multiple lines conferencing etc..?
 
A guy i know did this, had a landline for years, he activated a generic prepaid phone and had his landline phone number ported to the prepaid phone he activated giving it the same landline number he had for many years.
Then he set up google voice and had the same landline number from the generic pre paid cell phone ported to google voice, since google voice won't allow you to port a landline number. Then let the activated prepaid expire.
Then he got that, google voice, set up and uses the wifi with some kind of magic jack box to use a cordless phone in the house.
He also has smart phone on at&t, that is linked to google voice number, ditched his answering machine too, that he can call the landline google voice number on so that it rings.
Pretty smart, i don't know all the things he used to set it up, specific names of equipment but it works and it's free.
 
We're currently using Vonage for landline *cough cough* service, but I'm intrigued by this last post - if we port and port again, we can keep the same number (and not have to change again like we were forced to when we temporarily signed up with AT&T Digital telephone (we ported the old # to them, then found out someone lied to us and canceled the service but they would not allow the number to be ported back / out to another service....so, after 22 years of having the same number, we were forced to get a new one....)

The hardest part, though, is that Vonage allows calls to India (my home country) to be free - and that almost makes up for the prices we're paying here for Vonage, b/c I have a *LOT* of aunts, uncles, and cousins whom I haven't seen in 15+ years....most of my cousins have kids too lol...
 
I thought that companies *had* to port your old number by law.

Something about that they must do it, it's like an FCC outlined law, that what my pal told me...:confused:
 
No, it was something like it was too soon to port again there was some sort of time limit that we had to wait - Basically , AT&T said that we'd have to use their digital telephone service for at least a month before they'd port it over elsewhere since we just ported it in.

If this is incorrect, I'm still within a reasonable window to investigate and file suit if need be....
 
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