A while ago I had setup a voip system using Ring Central. Now the cost of having a service like Ring Central, isn't outrageous but it isn't inexpensive either. I also know a few people who were wanting a "LAN" line for their kids, and shaw and Telus are charging between $20 - $40 per month for a basic phone depending on what services you are subscribed to which is outrageous.
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| SHAW Phone Cost |
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| Telus Phone Costs |
So I started to do some reading about opensource pbx systems, and really liked freepbx, and am currently playing with it in a VM in my Lab. With all phones going network based with either a cellular base or an office voip phone, you don't have "lan lines" in that sense anymore. I had the good fortune of getting a hold of a Cisco SPA504G on the facebook marketplace for $20, and they range from $20USD to $150 on ebay. You will also need a POE injector which can run from $15 - $100 depending on what you want to buy. I got the TP-Link 150S which worked well for this.
I intend to finish my work with freepbx, but I needed to get something up and running pretty quick and was told that in canada, VOIPMS would be a good provider to use for a cloud based PBX. It has a great wiki for configuring devices.
To get the phone up and going you have first signup for a VOIPMS Account, and get it verified. Once that is done to get things going right away you will want to "add funds" from the Finances tab and pick a DID number (phone number). The minimum is $15USD purchase.
As you can see from the screen shot above, you can setup a number of settings, such as voicemail, caller id, hold music, etc. This was a little tricky to setup, it is much simpler to use ring central for setting it up but it wasn't to bad setting up the calling features I wanted on the phone and on the VOIP.MS account.
Configuring settings on VOIP.MS also requires making changes on the VOIP phone your using, so in my case Cisco SPA504G.
So first thing is first you must setup and verify your VOIP.MS Account.
The first thing I would recommend setting up is the cloud then configure the phone and adjust on either as you see fit. So if you go to DID Numbers -> Manage DID, you will get options for configuring your number, such as selecting the Server for your cloud host. I selected Vancouver because it is the closest one to Edmonton.
One thing you will want to change is the default ring time which I believe was 60 seconds, I set mine to 30, and you will want to associate the voicemail to the DID once you have voicemail setup.
To setup voicemail, you tie it to a DID, the wiki was an excellent resource for the setup, once I setup the voicemail number (it can be anything up to 10 digits) a password and you can setup if you want to skip it because I am setting this up as a home phone I did choose to skip it.
To make the changes you want to make to the phone you will want to click on the Admin Login
The Admin login give you many more settings that you don't get in user mode. We will be editing the Phone, and Ext 1-4. In Phone we want to put *97 in the voice mail number which will take us directly to our voicemail box we configured with our voicemail box we made for our DID. I also changed the short name for line key 1 to the phone number I am using with VOIP.MS
Then in Ext 1 I put the proxy url I want to use provided by voip.ms DID Numbers -> Manage DID (in my case vancouver2.voip.ms) and put the SIP number in the user id and your VOIP.MS Password in the password field.
Since I only have one line on my VOIP.MS account, I disabled lines 2 - 4 but that is up to you if that is something you want to do. The end result is your voicemail button going to your voicemail without requiring a password, displaying your number. Which makes the phone easy to use for everyone.
