VoiP Phone Question

[melomania]

Hello All,

I have a Cisco 7940G phone that I'd like to use at home for testing. I want everything in terms of the PBX done in the cloud. Very basic - calling in and out from my home desk. Free is best if possible, otherwise I'll end up spending a few bucks a month.

Do you recommend any service providers for this? I personally don't know much about VoiP and SIP trunks.

 

[Nate7311]

Just for General VOIP, as long as your home internet provider is stable, with decent latency and low jitter for the most part you'll be fine. Run a voip test HERE

The older Cisco phones are more of a pain for tweak for a starter device as you either have to configure them via the keypad and screen on the phone, telnet or have them TFTP a config file. Before anything else, verify that your device has a SIP firmware on it. If it's not then this blog post will show you the legit way of conversion.

HERE is a good place to start with on configuring SIP connections.

 

[firedrow]

If you have a home server, look at FreePBX as a VM (or setup a test system on Virtualbox). There's your free software. For home, I use Axvoice as my SIP provider. I don't get many calls, and I make most calls on my cell phone, so I only pay $9/month for service. FreePBX has a built-in Endpoint Manager, so it should be able to setup a TFTP for your phone, then it will reconfigure the phone for your PBX.

If you decide on Axvoice over others, let me know and I will help you get the SIP Tunnel and Call Inbound/Outbound Routing configured. I had to do some research to get mine stable with the correct settings.