Auto-Attendant upstream of mobile phone?

General Help
1

Seeking advice on how to use an auto-attendant upstream of a mobile phone, in a slightly unusual way.

Background: I worked in telephony a long time ago configuring Lucent Definity switches, but that was 25 years ago in a previous career when VoIP was mostly a curiosity… While I am familiar with most of the following concepts, it has been a very long time since I’ve done something like this, so I need a bit of a refresher ~

Goal:

  • Utilize IVR/Auto-Attendant and Caller ID whitelist features upstream of my mobile number, so that incoming callers who call my existing mobile number can be filtered, routed, or dropped accordingly
  • Record all incoming & outgoing calls, with required notification (voice notification for incoming, periodic beeps on outgoing)
  • Have calls routed to specific mailboxes, transcribed accordingly, with transcripts emailed
  • …while still retaining the existing phone number, and normal functionality of my cell phone (I.E.; SMS/RCS, data, etc).
  • The ‘Unusual’ bit: Looking to have callers call my existing mobile number > be directed to the auto-attendant > have them select Option 3 for me > be directed to my mobile phone. Ideally, I would like to not change my mobile number to accomplish this. (Open to using a mobile SIP client if those are reliable)

Questions:

  • Can this be done with FreePBX?
    • If so, do you have a rough outline of how to do so? Not expecting a full guide - I’m a full-grown adult who needs to learn things on my own - just was hoping to be pointed in the right direction : )
  • If this cannot be done exactly as hoped, is there a recommended best practice for a similar setup that can be done with FreePBX?

I appreciate your time, and thanks for your help!

2

Your going to need to find a SIP trunk provider that you can port your mobile number to. There’s no piece of software out there that will help you to phreak into your mobile carriers network and intercept phone calls from the PSTN to your carrier, before your carrier routes them to your cell phone. Well at least, not from Sangoma or any legitimate company, that is.

Obviously, you want to build your FreePBX system, get a SIP trunk from the PSTN to it, and then once you have the system built, tweaked and configured the way you want, then do the number port to the SIP trunk provider as the very last thing. Then once that’s going you can get a new cell # for your phone and change the outdial number in FreePBX to point to it.

As a finishing touch you can download a mobile SIPphone application and run it on your mobile phone then register into your FreePBX system, so that when you make outbound calls from your mobile phone they are outdialed with the old mobile phone #

During the inital setup of FreePBX there are several advertising blurbs, one of which is to Sangoma for their SIP trunks:

SIP Trunking | FreePBX - Let Freedom Ring

I think they give you the first month free on a new FreePBX PBX install. I’d use them if I were you as they can provide support to getting your SIP trunk working with your FreePBX system.

FreePBX is the wrapper around Asterisk which is just another PBX that pretty much works the same way any other PBX works including the Lucent gear you were familiar with. At least, it works the same way from a logical block perspective, the software interface is obviously different. I don’t think you will have any trouble at all with it.

There’s also a zillion virtual images of Linux Debian 12 out there such as the following:

So you don’t even need to learn anything about Linux at all. Just run one of the virtual images, login to it as root, run the FreePBX 17 install instructions which are simple, and poof you now have a virtual FreePBX, PBX. Login to the interface, get a machine ID for your PBX, contact Sangoma and get the free trunk running, and then spend the next month learning the FreePBX interface and setting up the IVR, outdialing to your cell, etc. When you are ready do the number port.

3

Got it, thank you! So, just to understand, in a nutshell (also noting for my own reference):

  • Spin up a VM inside my local install of Proxmox
  • Find a Debian image, install, then install FreePBX (my Linux-fu is…fine)
  • Monkey around, learn FreePBX, setup IVR
    (using ElevenLabs for prompts, unless there’s better recommendations?)
  • Setup trunking with SIP provider (Sangoma), setup outdialing
  • Port existing cell number to SIP provider
  • Establish new mobile phone number, usually done automatically when porting
    (used notionally for data service)
  • Bob’s your uncle! Enjoy less bothersome and better handled calls!

Is that about right? I understand how to do each of the steps, just want to make sure I have the order of ops roughly correct : )

4

I prefer the Debian 12 qcow2 images. There seems to be something funky with the newer images. I stick with the December 2024 images and I’m good. dpkg-reconfigure locales -y cos that doesn’t seem to be set out of the box. I use en_US UTF8.

Monkeying around learning it, I would recommend Crosstalk Solutions 30-part YouTube tutorial to get started: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1fn6oC5ndU_umAhL9A_1zkC90hMPDPNO&si=jJCiZNaKwZccIm7T

You want to pay a bit of attention to the Time Groups/Time Conditions bit as well as IVRs and Queues. One trick about getting this nailed the first time is to follow Chris’ advice of designing your entire call flow BEFORE you start implementing it on FreePBX.

Good luck and God speed. It gets interesting once you get over the learning curve

5

Sure, if you want all your prompts to sound like a cross between The Terminator and the BBC’s stable of actors…lol

FreePBX comes with a full set of prompts recorded from Allison Smith. As for the actual IVR voice menu itself, nothing really substitutes for an actual human voice, every AI generated menu I’ve ever heard for some reason just gives me the overwhelming urge to kick the stick up it’s ass that is already buried there 1 feet, the remaining 5…

Seriously, it literally takes a human being 10 times longer to apply deepfake audio techniques to an AI generated IVR to get it to pass the online AI detectors, and the longer the menu and more often it’s heard, the easier it is for a human to detect. They won’t always know it’s AI but they know “something’s off”

Otherwise, you have the general idea.