The other day I decided I needed a dedicated phone number for one of my projects so I started to look for good value VOIP providers… Eventually I came across sipgate.co.uk who are offering free UK phone numbers (inc 0845 numbers). With this deal all inbound calls are free and outbound calls are charged at their reasonable tariff. Given I will not be making many (if any at all) outbound calls this seems the perfect solution for me. Registration and setup took minutes and I was able to receive calls. Great!

Now I started thinking how cool it would be if I could have some of these call queuing and option based system on the phone number… I had heard of Asterisk before and started doing some research, before long I came across Trixbox.

Trixbox is basically linux (in this case CentOS) and Asterisk bundled together in one easy to install distribution. And comes with a great web ui for managing the Asterisk voice server. Some of you may also notice that there is also AsteriskNow as an alternative to Trixbox and wonder why I didn’t just go with that… No reason really, maybe I will try AsteriskNow some time.

Trixbox took me about 30 mins to get installed and configured. That includes setting up a SIP trunk for my sipgate.co.uk 0845 number. For someone who has zero experience in this technology that ain’t bad!

Over the next few weeks I will compile a dummies guide to setting this all up and post it here for everyone’s enjoyment.