Now It’s a No-Brainer: Free Skype Calling with Asterisk

Many of you may recall that last August we showed you an easy way to implement free calling to millions of cellphones using Gizmo5 and Asterisk®. Vaporware aside, it's been a quiet six months in the Skype for Asterisk department. But now the folks at Gizmo5 have outdone themselves once again. This time it's their new OpenSky service. Here's how it works. You can call as many Skype users as you like and talk for up to five minutes for free.

If there are people you frequently call and the time limit is a problem for you, then you can cough up $20 a year and make as many 2-hour Skype calls as you like to your ten best friends. If you've got more friends than that or if you plan to use this for something other than a home Asterisk system, then there are reasonably priced plans to accommodate you. $320 a year gets you 20 accounts to an unlimited number of Skype users with the same 2-hour per call limit. $800 buys you 50 accounts, and $1600 buys you 100 accounts per year.

Getting Started. The easiest way to integrate this into your existing Asterisk system is to sign up for a free Gizmo5 account and then follow our previous tutorial to set up your outbound trunk.

Once you have everything working, you're ready to add a few numbers on your Asterisk system for your Skype pals. Here's the easy way, and we'll cover some more sophisticated implementations in a subsequent article. Assuming you have a friend with a Skype username of joeschmo, here's what you need to do to call Joe by dialing 563 (J-O-E) from any extension on your Asterisk system.

Edit the /etc/asterisk/extensions_custom.conf file on your system and add the following line within the [from-internal-custom] context:

exten => 563,1,Dial(SIP/skype_joeschmo@proxy01.sipphone.com)


If you also use softphones which support SIP URI dialing, then you might want to add another entry like this in the same context:

exten => joeschmo,1,Dial(SIP/skype_joeschmo@proxy01.sipphone.com)


Now just reload your Asterisk dialplan, and you're ready to start calling your Skype buddies around the world from any Asterisk extension.

asterisk -rx "dialplan reload"


The FreePBX Alternative. As has been pointed out in a comment, you can accomplish much the same thing using newer versions of FreePBX without having to muck around in extensions_custom.conf. Just add an Extension, choose the Custom type, provide an Extension Number, a Display Name, and optional SIP Alias. Then insert the following in the dial field, save your entries, and reload the dialplan when prompted.

skype_joeschmo@proxy01.sipphone.com


$20 Buys You Skype Calling Aliases. One of the major drawbacks of Skype always has been the alphanumeric Skype names which make it next to impossible to place Skype calls using regular telephones. Well, Gizmo5 has solved that, too. With your $20 annual subscription which gets you 2-hour Skype calls to your 10 best friends for a year, you now can define new phone numbers to match against your 10 favorite Skype friends. For example, for a user named John Doe, you might choose 564-6363 (JOHN-DOE). Once you sign up for the $20 Skype subscription and configure this alias in your Gizmo account, you can reach John Doe on Skype by dialing 1-333-564-6363 through your Gizmo5 trunk from any Asterisk extension. In your Asterisk setup, just create an outbound route for Gizmo calls with the following dial strings, and you're all set.

1333NXXXXXX
333NXXXXXX


Special thanks to JPE on the PBX in a Flash Forum for the original tip and to Adrian at Gizmo5 Operations for the alias demo. Enjoy!

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