Now that we’ve got Asterisk installed, we need to get your sipgate one and Google Voice accounts configured for our setup.
SIP Phone
The first thing you’ll need is a SIP phone. You can get either a hardware phone (hard phone) like the Polycom SoundPoint IP 321, or a software phone (softphone) like Telephone for Mac OS X. It will probably be easiest to work with a softphone for now. If you need some help finding one take a look at this list at Voip-Info.org, or this list at Wikipedia. Whichever phone you choose, be sure it supports SIP.
Configuring sipgate
Now that you’ve got a SIP phone, we’ll get it setup to connect to sipgate. Later your phones will connect through your Asterisk PBX, but for now we need a phone directly connected to sipgate.
- Login to your sipgate account at http://sipgate.com and click the settings button. You should see something like this:
- Click on the SIP Credentials link on the left. You’ll see a new box like this:
Where your SIP-ID is something like 9999999e1 (your account # followed by e1) and your SIP-Password is something like AAAA1A - Use these settings to configure your SIP phone. You may want to look at this sipgate FAQ entry for some more info.
- Once you’ve configured your SIP phone, and it is successfully registering to sipgate, call your sipgate Phone Number to verify your SIP phone rings.
Configuring Google Voice
Now we need to configure Google Voice to work properly with our Asterisk setup.
- Log in to Google Voice and go to Settings > Calls. You need to make sure Call Screening and Presentation are turned off and Caller ID (in) is set to Display caller’s number. Your Calls settings should look like this:
- Go to Phones in the Google Voice settings and click Add another phone. Enter a Name like sipgate, enter your sipgate phone number, and select Home as the Phone Type. When you click Save, Google Voice will take you through the steps to verify the phone number you entered.
- Once your sipgate number is verified, give you Google Voice number a call. Your SIP phone should now be ringing.
Be sure to do a reality check on your Google Voice forwarding settings. If you’re using this setup to give yourself a Home phone that multiple people would answer, you’ll likely want to be sure that it only forwards to your sipgate number, but there may be situations where you want forwarding to stay on for other phones.
Now we get to the fun part: Configuring Asterisk… (continue)