asterisk

[Guest]

Hi all,

Can anyone tell me if the Raspberry is a capable solution to running a VoIP/Sip based telephone system, using Linux, Asterisk and Free PBX??

Thanks in advance

[Techmeology]

At the moment, the audio drivers are experimental, however when they're working, it should be possible to use the RPi for VoIP - provided you use a USB microphone (the RPi does not have a microphone port).

[Guest]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I was thinking of it more as a server, transferring the calls to other networked machines with either, their own softphone or to a hardware IP phone on the network. Would this make a difference?

Thanks

Brian

[Techmeology]

Well, you wouldn't need the USB microphone:p I guess it depends on how CPU/memory intensive that is. The best way to find out would be to try it...
In terms of traffic alone, you may be interested to know that my RPi is able to wget to /dev/null at over 80 MBit/s.

[Guest]

Thanks again.

Sounds like it should handle most small to medium size systems. Think you're right, best bet is to try it.

Cheers

Brian

[linker3000]

Interesting idea. If you can get Asterisk to work/compile then it should deal with simple call handling OK. Where the RPi might struggle is in conference call / multi-party audio mixing (which is done on the Asterisk server) - I doubt if the Pi could transcode/mix many audio streams on the CPU but it would be a different story if the GPU was involved, but that would take some clever coding. Hmm - a small business PBX for the price of an RPi !!!!

[pepedog]

Arch has asterisk-1.8.2.3, it worked when it was first packaged a while ago

[linker3000]

I have just downloaded Asterisk 1.8, installed the dependencies and compiled it on Debian (took about an hour or so) and it worked first time - my Android phone running CSIPSimple is registered and I have successfully made an outbound call to the Digium test server.

No GUI or friendly setup prog yet - I just tweaked the default config files to enable the sample extension and used it for my phone.

Looks promising!