Asterisk is a VoIP based PBX, it is great to manage your PBX needs

From Wikipedia:

Asterisk is a software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX) originally created in 1999 by Mark Spencer of Digium. Like any PBX, it allows attached telephones to make calls to one another, and to connect to other telephone services including the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services. Its name comes from the asterisk symbol, “*”. Asterisk is released under a dual license model, using the GNU General Public License (GPL) as a free software license and a proprietary software license to permit licensees to distribute proprietary, unpublished system components.

The complicated part of this is usually how to send your analog lines to Asterisk, the solution is to use external FXO equipments, that converts normal land lines to IP lines, and then configured that FXO equipment as the Gateway for the Asterisk, so all external call can be routed to that Gateway.

But now a days, are better ways, and one of them is to ask your telephone provider with IP lines, so you only have to make your Asterisk to log as the user, and then use those IP trunks to route external calls through those “VoIP lines”.

I’m planning to do that, and will be posting my experiences.