Do you have an extra line sitting empty on that IP phone on your desk? Here’s an idea for it: Use it to make and receive Google Voice calls by linking it to an OBi110.
Yackin' on the OBi
Setting up an IP phone-OBi connection will also allow you to dial other OBi users directly and easily give the IP phone incoming and outgoing access to a PSTN line — including regular landline emergency 911 calling — with no other hardware needed.
Follow along, and you will:
- Have incoming calls to your Google Voice number ring on your IP Phone and, concurrently, on any other phone (your cell phone, for example) you forward Google Voice calls to;
- Have any incoming call to your OBiTalk number or to a number on a service attached to an OBi110′s physical “Line” port (a PSTN line, for example) ring on your IP phone and, either concurrently or sequentially on another phone number, such as your cell phone;
- Correctly route outgoing calls on your IP phone: Emergency 911 calls through your PSTN (or a E911 enabled VoIP service through a separate analog telephone adaptor), OBiTalk calls through your OBi, and all “regular” phone calls through Google Voice.
All of this can be done without the need for a computer running constantly in the background. You don’t even need to know the ins and outs of the Asterisk PBX because we won’t be using one — fire up an IP phone and an OBi, and you’re all set.
You will have to install Google Voice on your OBi before getting started. Refer to the Voxilla How-To, Use Google Voice and OBi for All Your Calls (free) for see how. You will want to use Google Voice as the primary calling service on SP1 of the OBi — those instructions will set you up right.
In this How-To, we’ll be installing Google Voice on a Cisco SPA525. If you have any of the Cisco SPA series of IP phones, and you have access to the administrator user name and password for the phone, you should have little difficulty following these instructions, as the settings screens are very similar across the entire Cisco SPA line.
If you have a different IP phone model, and a bit of technical knowledge about your phone, you will probably be able to figure out how Step 1 below applies to your specific situation. If not, just ask in the comments, or in the Voxilla Forum, and we should be able to come up with answers for you for all but the least common of IP phones.
As we go through the steps below, you will be asked to note certain settings, that will be entered elsewhere in the process (including the IP address of your OBi). Keep a list of these settings in a separate text document so that you can easily refer to them (and copy/paste them) throughout. Start the list now with the IP address of your OBi.
Let’s get cracking.
