Comments on: A Marriage Made in Heaven: Sprint Cellphone + Asterisk@Home = Unlimited U.S. Cell Phone Calls for $5

By: david

david — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:28:14 +0000

Hi, this is david.
I am looking for a way to look up and find out who a cell phone number belongs to. I’ve tried everything on the internet from reverse phone number, criss cross, etc. only to find out that the number is unpublished and unavailable. I really do not want to pay a fee. Thanks!

By: jh

jh — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 14:25:04 +0000

"Outbound cell phone calls through Asterisk could display your cellphone number, and inbound calls to your Asterisk system that are forwarded to your cellphone could display the inbound caller’s number instead of your home number."

Now, if I "spoof" my CID to the "caller" and not from my home phone–sprint-to-home will not work and the call will be billed.

In short, I dont see a way to get forwarded CID-to-cell and still be on the S2H network.

Please, tell me I’m wrong…:)

By: TK

TK — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 04:56:13 +0000

Does this work with pbx in a flash?
For some reason i followed all the directions but when placing a call from my cell phone it just rings without giving me the option to input the password.

[WM: It will, but it may need some tweaking to support Asterisk 1.4. We’ll have a look shortly.]

By: mel2000

mel2000 — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 01:58:27 +0000

This a response to the #19 reply: In order for an outsider to use someone else’s i2Bridge account they will need to not only know the VoiceStick number (easy), they’ll also have to know that person’s i2Bridge password (not easy).

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 01:03:15 +0000

I actually have done this with t-mobile. I thought of it myself, even though I assumed other people have thought about it as well, and it turns out that people were at least a year and a half ahead of me. But anyway, it works with MyFaves just fine. I have even gone as far as allowing it to dial just by pressing the first 3 letters of the persons name that way I dont have to remember the phone numbers I want to dial. If I have multipes with the first 3 letters it gives me a directory listing with press 1 for and 2 for etc. This does mean I have to record the menues myself, but I know with AsteriskNow, and likely Asterisk@Home, it is very easy to do so.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 03:43:09 +0000

WM, thank you so much for this. I've been using the Sprint to Home service combined with VoiceStick for about a year. I've slashed my cell phone bill in half, to about $65/month. Nerd Vittles rocks!

By: Michael Irvine

Michael Irvine — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 16:46:15 +0000

I currently have tmobile, and am wondering, do they have any plans which can allow my family to do this, i have 3 phones in my family plan. I wanna make it so my sis can call whoever she wants and still have unlimited minuites. ill try to get more information

By: Grace

Grace — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 19:54:04 +0000

I’m really excited to read about the Sprint cell phone and home phone’s ability to marry. However, I’m bummed that I have Cingular and am signed into a 2 year plan. When do you think Cingular might come up with the same deal? Or…..do you know of a way the same thing will work with a Cingular plan? Thanks

[WM: Cingular (now AT&T) actually has a plan that beats the socks off the Sprint plan. Instead of rollover minutes, you can opt for their AT&T Unity Plan which lets you place unlimited, free calls to anyone (wireless or wired) on the AT&T network. Assuming your home phone service is also through AT&T, your Cingular phone can be used to make unlimited calls to that number. And once connected to your home phone system, you can make dial-out calls through any VoIP provider you desire without incurring per minute charges from Cingular or AT&T. Better yet, next Friday you can add an Apple iPhone for the best of all worlds. Good luck.]

By: Robbie

Robbie — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 16:52:57 +0000

Can someone please explain to me how to make trixbox answer a trunk right away not wait for 3 rings? Thankyou!

By: George

George — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 16:41:16 +0000

Has anyone tried this with any of the other providers with unlimited plans to particular numbers, such as T-Mobile’s MyFaves?

By: Gabriel

Gabriel — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 18:02:10 +0000

I bought Linksys 3102 instead of Sipura 3000 to replace my Sipura 2100 that I have been using with Broadvoice for 2 years .My VOIP does not work anymore. Nobody at Broadvoice seems to be able to help me .One tech support told me it might be a firewall …..but I check , I do not have a firewall. Another told me that the Linksys 3102 does not pull or work with the Sipura 3000 configuration.
After this I still have to configure the whole thing to do my outbound calls.
I followed your instruction ,I have Sprint with free incoming and the "Sprint to Home " service.
Please help me

By: mike

mike — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 06:05:00 +0000

Can I spoof my outgoing caller id with telasip through asterisk to display my cell phone number? I would only want to do this when calling into my asterisk server from my cell phone so the person I am calling would see my cell number. I think I am just going to go with the $39.99 free incoming calls so everyone can still call my cell phone number instead of a new number.

Any suggestions on this… I’d like to know if it’s possible too.

[WM: The answer is YES. We need a better word than spoof which implies pretending to be someone you’re not. You actually can do it in both directions if you want to. Outbound cell phone calls through Asterisk could display your cellphone number, and inbound calls to your Asterisk system that are forwarded to your cellphone could display the inbound caller’s number instead of your home number.]

By: Phil

Phil — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 13:47:24 +0000

I am a newbie to TrixBox/Asterisk. I have set up TB using these instructions

It basically works fine except, except I am now trying to work the last kinks out.

The most annoying problem is that there is a significant lag in making the connection when an outside line dials the home phone, before the cell phone rings, or picks up. Lets say I am initiating a call to the home/cell destination. from the moment I hear the phone ring in the earpiece, till the cell starts ringing it is maybe 5 seconds. Once someone answers the lag in speech is minimal, and perfectly acceptable.

If no one answers and the cellphone voicemail pick up, then the caller actually hears the message, a couple seconds into the recording.

These lags are waaaay longer than if I had called the cell direct. I knew there would be some overhead, but this is pretty annoying.

Now for details:
1) I have installed trixbox (1.2.3 and 2.0.0rc2) on a virtual machine, running as the guest OS under an ubuntu (linux 2.6.17 kernel) host running on a 2.4Ghz Intel machine with 640 MB memory. I have allocated 256MB to the virtual machine.

2) I am using les.net for the VOIP provider.

How can I reduce that lag?

[WM: Linux (Ubuntu) time slices for everything. VMware takes its turn. Don’t know if there is a way to bump up the time slice allocation or not, but it works wonders on a Windows machine running VMware with TrixBox. My suggestion would be to try it on a dedicated Linux box and compare the performance.]

By: John Dell coupons

John Dell coupons — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 20:20:13 +0000

I was Googling ‘Nerd Vittles’ for my coupons site and, after ending up here, I wanted to trackback. but for some reason, trackbacks are not working at the moment…keep up there..

[WM: Not only are they not working at the moment, but they’re not going to work ever because of folks trying to sell crap like video poker, prescription drugs and… Dell coupons.]

By: Jason

Jason — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 10:56:28 +0000

I’m trying to use the TelaSIP trial/sample above with my sprint phone. For some reason, the return calls always go straight to voicemail. I’ve tried two different sprint phones and they both do it. Perhaps sprint is redirecting the invalid caller id call (555-555-5555) direct to customers voicemail?

By: Jason

Jason — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 08:21:24 +0000

I've setup as directed above. Call my home phone, enter the passcode, get a "dial tone"... I then enter a number to dial and wait... It then makes a busy signal and hangs up. What could be causing this? I've tried pressing "#" after entering the number to dial as well... [WM: DTMF problem. Don't know why.]

By: Marc

Marc — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 01:55:24 +0000

WARNING: If you are using Voicestick with Asterisk, your days are numbered - More Voicestick Problems, Retroactively Rewriting the Rules? [WM: Sorry to say I smelled this one coming a long time ago. There are lots of good providers. Just move!]

By: Mike

Mike — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 20:50:32 +0000

Anyone configured this with the updated trixbox 1.1.1? I configured the basic box ok but haven’t problems with this Sprint thing. Can anyone send me the changes if they got the new configuration figured out? Ward, can you update? Thanks.

By: Ben Lewis

Ben Lewis — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 16:33:36 +0000

I am using about 2200 minutes a month with Voicestick for maybe 3 months now. It saves me a ton on the cell (about 90% of the mins. go with Sprint). I assume like most VOIP companies there is a limit to the Unlimited. I know I am running close, as I see posts on broadbandforum about others having cut off problems at around 2500 min a month.

SOMEDAY some legal type will go after one of the big boys and question the "unlimited" hype.

I figure mine comes out to under 1 cent a minute on the out bound and that is still a deal. Love my Voicestick service

By: batmon

batmon — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 03:38:23 +0000

I am using voicestick. It works great until they disabled my account without telling me. I called them and they said I use too many minutes. I purchased $25 unlimited world plan and my Sprint shows I used 330 min of mobile to home. So, voicestick disabled my account becuase I used 330 min in 3 days, with my "umlimited" plan. What in the world?!

I am confused with your Asterisk@Home solution. So you mean I will use TelaSIP for unlimited incoming/outgoing fordwarding with my Sprint mobile phone, right? If this is the case, what is the second VoIP (Broadvoice) for? I assume Sipura SPA-3000 is for using regular phone calls to VoIP. If I configure TelaSIP to do call forwarding to my mobile phone only when no one answering my home phone, then I don’t need the second VoIP service, isn’t it?

btw, how much is international charge with TelaSIP? I can’t find those info on their website.

Thanks.

By: TDave00

TDave00 — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 07:14:10 +0000

Ok, just about ready to give this a go – just a few more questions. (You should really think of opening up some forums if you don’t already have them.)
1. Telasips $15/mo plan will only let me make one call at a time? i.e Me and my wife wouldn’t be able to use the cell phone making outgoing calls at the same time? That’s not a dealbreaker but would be nice.
2. Can I spoof my outgoing caller id with telasip through asterisk to display my cell phone number? I would only want to do this when calling into my asterisk server from my cell phone so the person I am calling would see my cell number. I think I am just going to go with the $39.99 free incoming calls so everyone can still call my cell phone number instead of a new number.
3. Does anyone know of a way that we can add our sprint to phone number in front of a contact’s number in our sprint phonebook and then have it wait for a few seconds until we have a dial tone then dial the contact number? For example I remember some years ago I had a free voice mail number. To check it it I had it programmed into one of my speedial numbers on my phone. I had my speed dial setup to dial the number and then wait a few seconds for it to pick up and then enter my passcode. Is there a way to do this so I don’t lose the function of my phonebook on my sprint phone? (This could be a dealbreaker if it weren’t going to save me almost $50/mo.

If voicepulse would just let me port my numbers over to Telasip this would save me almost $70/mo. I regress.

Thanks for the info again. Love the site/blog.

[WM: For #1, use multiple providers or multiple TelaSIP lines. For #2, we’ve covered that on the blog. Just do a little googling. For #3, most cellphones support a pause code that will do what you need. The Treos certainly do. Good luck.]

By: Ben Lewis

Ben Lewis — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 23:44:44 +0000

I am doing the voicestick.com thing. Works great. Started with the free account with a $5 credit, now I an doing GLOBAL UNLIMITED for $25. What an insane thing. If only the general public know about it. DON’T TELL THEM !!!!!

By: TDave000

TDave000 — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 12:13:07 +0000

Would your incoming calls on your cellphone show who is actually calling you or would it show your home phone number?

[WM: If you’re using a VoIP provider that allows you to adjust CallerID, you could set it to the number of the person calling. That’s what we do with TelaSIP and our One Ringy-Dingy service, for example.]

By: Carlos

Carlos — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 04:17:46 +0000

If you live in one of the areas serviced by MetroPCS, they have a no frills local calls only flat rate plan for $30 per month. This includes both incoming and outbound calls and the basic plan doesn’t even offer voice mail to get in the way.