raverX

This is a project for my company with an aim to help reduce our yearly telephone bill and to help integrate our external staff with the company phone system.

We have been using an LG Aria 34e telephone system since about 2002, which managed our 3 incoming PSTN lines. For what we needed this system was very good and if it weren't for the fact that I wanted to try and cut our expenses down further we probably would have kept it.

Our monthly land line bill is on average about $350, which includes the line rental of our 3 incoming lines plus the line dedicated for our fax server. This equates to about $100 per month in line rental and $250 per month in call costs.

A friend of mine, Adam from OzNetworks had been playing with VOIP for about a year at this point in time and had encouraged me on several occasions to give Asterisk a shot.

After my company acquired an office at Movie World Studios and we received the first telephone bill I realised that we needed to do something to ensure this expansion didn't result in a massive increase in our operating costs and steal away from our profits so I went back to Adam and started talking seriously about Asterisk and VOIP.

I decided to go with the Snom range of phones which I purchased from TechTopia. I purchased a Snom 360 for the reception desk and 3x Snom 320's for my office and the two remaining internal staff desks. Adam also recommended I use X-Lite for my external staff, which is a softphone client for Windows and Linux.

I may change the setup at the Studios at a later stage to have a proper handset, but to keep costs down for now, this option has worked quite well with a $15 headset from our suppliers.

Through Adam's recommendation, we started with an account with SIPme, who provide Australia wide calls for approximately 10c untimed and slightly lower mobile call rates than our current land line provider Optus.

We configured Asterisk to accept all incoming calls from the 3x PSTN lines and make all local, interstate and mobile calls through SIPme; with 1300, 1800 and 1900 calls made through the PSTN system. As we make very few international calls at all at present no rules have been defined for this traffic type.

The next Optus bill we received had our bill at $150 for the month, which added to our $40 spend with SIPme which meant our bill for the month (give or take on the starting dates as the Optus bill start didn't co-incide with when we started with SIPme) of $190 - saving of $160!

Baring in mind that we implemented the server over the Christmas break, so our telephone spend would have been down for this period anyway. It will be interesting to see how future months go. I am hoping to make a saving of at least $100 per month, which may eventually allow me to drop one of the incoming PSTN lines.

As I used the Gentoo ebuild of Asterisk to make package management easier, I'm still waiting for the package maintainers to update the version to v1.4 which is meant to add quite a few extra features which will resolve a few quirks we currently have with the system (predominantly that we can't park calls at the moment, you must hold / transfer them live).