Skype, Cause, Effect, and Overkill

My loathing of Skype’s new UI and horrible group conferencing performance at work has led me to implement a PBX at home. When I stop to think about it, it must be overkill, but once I got started, it was as if the momentum of geeky obsession just carried me along for the ride. The gateway drug was downloading ISOs of FreePBX, Asterisk, and SipXecs, and getting them running as conference bridges using software VOIP phones within minutes. “Hmm, ” I said, “pretty nice, but I don’t have time to really deploy this at work.” Obviously the solution was to implement it at home. So I can have teleconferences and page the kids in the playroom. Right?

It started with a couple VOIP phones on my computer for testing, but then I stumbled upon michigantelephone‘s blog, which had a lot of related information, and linked the rest of what I needed to picture what by that time I knew I was going to do. Before long, I’d set up a PBX, bought a pair of Obihai OBi110’s to act as gateways for our analog telephone line and our Ooma, added a Snom M9 VOIP DECT phone, and dropped the voicemail service and long distance fees from our local telephone bill.

Hooking the Ooma to a PBX gets around its inherent inflexibility by treating it as just another SIP provider. With the OBi110 also set up with our Google Voice numbers, we now have four directly-dialable telephone numbers that ring our house phones, all of which we can use simultaneously. Six phone numbers, if you count our mobiles. Of course, I could also put VOIP applications on our mobile phones.

Overkill? Maybe!

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