Last week discovered Gizmo, the neato VOIP service from SIPPhone.com. After talking to some WPLUGgers, I was inspired to install Asterisk, the open source PBX software. If I actually had a land line, this might be more useful, but without one, I was determined to make use of it. As I found out, it’s pretty simple to do a gateway both to and from the PSTN.
The first thing that I discovered is that it is possible to have Asterisk behave as your Gizmo client. Using these instructions, you’ll quickly get it so folks dialing your Gizmo number will reach your Asterisk PBX. Supposedly, those instructions will also let you use another client to make calls out to the GIZMO network, but I’ve been unable to get that to work yet.
The next cool thing was getting a free Washington state phone number from IPKall. It was terribly simple to set up, just fill out the form, and for the SIP proxy give it proxy01.sipphone.com, and my Gizmo phone number as the user, and within an hour I had a dial in number to my computer. So now I can go and dial 360-469-0573 and I’ll reach my computer. Right now it’s just an echo test, but I’d eventually like to be able to dial into my MythTV box.
Anyway, as I do more fun stuff, I’ll post it here. Next up is fun with Free World Dialup. That will provide 1-800 number access direct from my box. I was hoping that I could already have it working, but it’s having problems with IAX (that’s the Inter-Asterisk protocol) at the moment. Also, it looks like IAX Tel is also not behaving well right now.