First, long story short, I want to have VoIP phones as a side project between me and 3 friends. A free at home setup where we can call each other using extensions but not necessarily a full fledged phone number. I can’t seem to figure out how to accomplish this.
Ok, longer story.
I have a bunch of VoIP phones. Not for company use. Just for fun. I’ve never setup a VoIP service but I thought it would be neat to setup one on a home server and connect my phones. Kinda like an in home intercom where I can have a phone in each room and call the room.
Google recommended FreePBX. I setup a server and added 4 extensions. It works. I haven’t figured out fancy features but I can call the phones using their extension.
That’s great and accomplishes half of what I want. But I also want to give my friends a phone and have it be able to call my phone using its extension.
So I tried. I have a phone and I have it at my friend’s house but it won’t register with my network. I setup port forwarding so that ports 10,000 to 20,000 all forward to my server. I allowed the traffic through my firewall. I set the phone to use my home IP. And… nothing. It doesn’t register. Shows status 408.
I port forwarded all traffic on the above ports for my friends house to the phones IP. Still nothing.
I thought maybe the whole trunk thing was what I needed so I signed up for a free trial but that just confuses me to no end. Something tells me it’s only for outbound full fledged numbers and not extensions.
So I guess my question is, can I have a phone outside my network register as an extension on my network so we can call each other for free? And if so, how do I set it up? Do I need each house to have their own server running?
Imagine a business with multiple offices and the business wants everyone to be able to call each other via extension since they all are under the same company.l, just different locations. So Linda in office A can dial 1201 to speak to Larry in office B. How would that company setup FreePBX to allow that?