You must have heard about IP Phone and SIP (Software IP Phone).Nowadays standard PSTN phone are being replaced by IP Phones one of the main reason why companies are switching towards IP Phones is its low cost and easy setup.

What is VoIP ?

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) is a general term for a family of transmission technologies for delivery of voice communications over IP networks such as the Internet or other packet-switched networks. Other terms frequently encountered and synonymous with VoIP are IP telephony, Internet telephony, voice over broadband (VoBB), broadband telephony, and broadband phone.

Setting up an IP Phone server and configuring soft phones is quite easy and you won’t believe that you can do all of this using free softwares you will not need to pay a single penny.

First of all let me write down the requirements.

*  Dedicated Machine or Virtual machine with the following specifications. 700 MHz processor. 10 GB Hard disk. At least256 mb of Ram(512 Recommended)

*  Trixbox(IP Phone Server Software).

*  Any Softphone or Hardphone.

Now lets start the process.

1) Download trixbox CE 2.6.2 (Stable) from the following link.

http://master.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/asteriskathome/trixbox-2.6.2.2.iso

After downloading if you are gonna use it on dedicated machine burn the image into CD otherwise you can use ISO with Vmware or any other virtualization software.

2) Here i have assumed that you are using virtual machine the process is same for dedicated machine.

3) Use .iso with Vmware or any other virtualization software and start the virtual machine.You will be greeted with a cool green screen of trixbox installation.Now press enter to install trixbox.

4) It will prompt you to select language so select the language you wanna use and press OK.

5) It will now ask for your timezone.This is an important step so please select the correct timezone.

6) Now you will need to select the password for root user select the password and rewrite it to confirm and press OK.

7) Installation will be started in 1 minute and it will reformat your harddisk and install trixbox.

8) When installation is done your will be restarted and you will have the following screen very soon.

Trixbox console

9) At this point i was little confused while logging in.In the documentation of trixbox it was written that the username is “maint” and password is “password” so i tried to login to console using maint but i was unsuccessful.So let me clear the password confusion for you.

There are 2 username and password you will need to use to login to trixbox.

Username and password you will need to use for logging in to console.

Username : root

Password  is the password you supplied during installation.

Username and password you will need to use for logging in to Gui of trixbox.

Username : maint

Password : password

10) We need to enter an IP for IP Phone server here.Enter the following command.

system-config-network

and enter an static IP which you wanna use it is always better to use LAN IP at this point.

11) After assigning an IP you can login to GUI.

Open up IE or any other browser and enter the ip you selected in step 9.

12) After logging in to GUI You will recieve the following interface.

13) Now it is the time to add first extension.

Click on PBX > PBX Settings > Extension

Select Generic SIP Device and click submit.

You will need to enter the following details to add an extension.

User extension (It can be anyone like 202,302,402 and so on.

Display Name (Enter any name you want)

Secret (Write any word you want to be used as a secret for this extension).

14) You can see all the extensions on right side.

15) Now its the time to configure softphone.

To see the list of free softphone check out my post 5 Best free VoIP Phone Softwares

Lets suppose you have downloaded and installed X-Lite.

when you will run X-Lite for first time it will ask for you SIP account.

You will have the following dialog box.

• In the first box of display name enter the display name you entered while adding an extension on trixbox.
• Second box is for username.It is the extension number you entered while adding an extension on trixbox.
• Third box is for password enter the secret you entered while adding an extension on trixbox.
• Fourth is for authorization username it is also as extension number you entered while adding an extension on trixbox.
• In the fifth box of domain enter the IP address of your trixbox server.
• Check register with domain and receive incoming calls.
• select domain and click apply then OK

You are now done and you will have a final screen looks like the following.

Now let me send a test call to my number and i will have the following.

Note : By following the steps mentioned above you will have a complete local phone server and in order to make an external call you will need to buy and use internet telephony service provider.