I have not been able to find any recent topics on this anywhere on the internet, so i’m not sure of the appropriate terminology, so i’ll just describe the use case i’m going for and hopefully you guys can weigh in and point me in the right direction.
I am trying to run a residential area with our subscribers using Freepbx. each of the houses will have 5-7 IP phones. I am trying to hook up all the phones in each house so that if someone dials the house, all of them ring. Now this easy enough to do in several different ways. However, once the call is answered i want anyone in the house to be able to pick up another handset and talk. For example, if you call the house, mom answers the phone; the call is for jim, so she tells jim to take his call; jim picks up the handset that’s closest to him, says hello, and mom hangs up. yes, similar to how phones worked 50 years ago 
i realize this is possible to do with an ATA, but we do not want to go that route. Is this possible with freepbx using IP phones?
You cannot easily do this directly with IP phones (bridged appearances). You would need to use call parking to have phone one park the call, then phone two could retrieve it.
is bridged appearance not an asterisk functionality?
Technically asterisk supports it, practically FreePBX does not.
lol. nice way of putting it. It’s like encountering one of those “minimum maintenance” signs when traveling. a good indicator that it would be a darn good idea to drive to the next road 
Have you ever used the SLA? any experience with it at all?
Yes but over my years of experience, for customers who demand SLA, I use FreeSwitch/FusionPBX. It’s far less painful and generally ‘Just Works’
alright. thanks bud. i’ll read up on it some.
These suggestions do not address your need, which is to automatically conference someone else who picks up a phone into an existing call. You can create SLA but it won’t let someone pick up a line and just start talking. Analog bridging is the way to do what you want so you’ll have to decide how much you want this feature vs. having voip phones.
I can think of a way you can do something pretty close to what you are asking. Incoming calls will ring all the phones and if any phone answers then the caller and callee are not bridged directly but instead joined in a conference room. All the phones have a BLF set to the conference room hint and if anyone wants to join the call, they pick up the phone and press the BLF button. Then the original answerer can drop off or stay in, and any other phone could also join in on the call.
It would only work for incoming calls. For outbound calls you would not be able to yell down the hall “Sam is on the line!” and get them to pick up and join. But there’s probably a way to make that work too if you are motivated.
hey. that conference thing in conjunction with the BLF might even be better than analog bridging… cause then you could have someone be on the phone without tying up all the other phones in the house. (like analog bridging would do) best of both worlds.
for outbound calls, i think sam could just call his own house number, and the person already on the line would answer the ‘call waiting’, conference him into the group, and then just hang up. at that point sam and the other end would be the only ones left on the call. (provided the conference isn’t hinged on the first caller and gets disconnected with he hangs up)
but yeah. spending a few million hours getting those house moms up to speed with the new system we’ll have most of what we need + being successful new-age fads by having voip phones 
Goto Extension > Advanced > Max Contacts …Set this to the number of phones you want to use with this extension…In Extension Options > Outbound Concurrency Limit… I also increase this, it allows each phone to make outgoing calls privately even if one already is using the line
Forgot to add… You can now also transfer the call to your Home number… This will cause all the phone in that other extension to ring… anyone can pick up the call…
thanks for that. was actually not aware of the outbound limit.
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