I have service with a local provider who uses an SPA-2101 adapter. It is locked and they won’t give me the secret code or access to the Admin screens. They don’t have any easy way to block callers like telemarketers. I then ordered a new number with a provider who lets me connect via SIP.
Now, this may be obvious to others, however I found it interesting. While playing with another SPA-2102, I realized that if you can access the user screen of the adapter, you CAN do some changes yourself. One item appears to be that you can configure (in my version) 8 different telephone numbers to call different telephone numbers or extensions. Thus if you had a few telemarketers, you could configure their numbers and forward them to another number (like the bus station pay phone).
Since I want to change from the old service to the new number, I decided to see what kind of call forwarding I could do. Configuring the old adapter to just call the new inbound number didn’t help much as Caller ID would change. Then I tried adding my Asterisk IP address to the call forward location ( Cfwd All Dest: [email protected] ) where 123 is the extension on my PBX I want the calls to come into and after the @ sign is my pbx IP address.
At first the calls did not come in however, I changed the “allow anonymous calls” option and things are working. I actually created a route and ring group to announce to callers that the number is changing soon, I announce the new number and tell them I will connect them.
I just thought it was cool to be able to take an adapter that I have limited access to and still have my PBX in the middle.