Cheap Home Phone via CME
My first job out of college started as an internship during college. I was in charge of IT for a branch of an international automotive fleet management company. We had consultants come in to make most infrastructure changes and I’d use every opportunity to learn more about each. I quickly became interested in the phone system (Cisco CallManager(IP PBX), Cisco Unity Connection (Voicemail), and Cisco Contact Center Express (IVR / Agents).
That branch I worked at ended up closing and I ended up landing a job at the consulting firm they used. There among other tasks I took over management of their hosted Cisco CallManager / Unity Connection environment. A perk of working there was we got free rack space, power, and IP transit in the datacenter for personal servers in what we called the “brocolo”. For staying and helping shutdown the office at my old job I was given a handful of equipment including a couple Dell PowerEdge servers. I set them up as ESXi hosts and built a lab with VMs. This included a clustered Call Manager and Unity Connection environment. In the end, my lab was actually more robust than the production hosted environment I supported!
We had a thousand block (ie 715-555-1xxx) of phone numbers from CenturyLink along with three PRIs (23 channels for calls each, two PRIs for local/inbound, and one for long distance) in order to provide dial-tone. I purchased a Cisco 2811 router to use as my data and voice border router and setup a SIP trunk and a PRI from my lab to the company production equipment along with 10 phone numbers. Using this and a previously established DMVPN connection at home I setup a home office phone:
Five years later the servers are long gone and Charlotte and I have a regular home phone because cell phones don’t work well at the new house. We got it for free through Charlotte’s work but she got a new job and we were facing paying $20 a month on top of our cell phones which was not appealing.
I started thinking back to my home office phone and thought it’d be pretty neat to get another IP PBX working again with three numbers: a standard home phone, a home office for Charlotte and a home office for me. Setting CallManager up at home didn’t seem viable with loud noisy power hungry servers so I thought I’d try my hand at setting up Call Manager Express on the 2811 router we were now using at home.
I selected an over the top SIP provider (no more PRI) to be the new phone company and registered three phone numbers. Not long after getting it working a friend came into possession of a handful of Cisco phones which he gave to me.
To handle the home phone I used a Cisco ATA (Analog telephone Adapter) which was another item I was given from my first job. The monthly cost for all three phone lines comes out to about $8 a month vs $20 for a single line.
