For a while now, I had not being using FreeSWITCH for my VoIP, but just logging into PennyTel directly with my Nokia E65. It worked OK, but the voice quality wasn’t as good as going through FreeSWITCH.

A month ago my old ADSL router died, so I bought a Billion 5200N to replace it. Since then, I’d been having weird problems with VoIP not working, and the Wifi to LAN bridging stopping dead whenever there was a bit of traffic over it.

It took me a while to sort out all the peculiarities of the Billion.

1. A change of ethernet ports on the router fixed the bridge locking up problem. It took a lot of time and weird theories before I fixed that.
2. When setting up the router from factory defaults, I have to save the wireless interface twice when I change the SSID before it will allow my wireless devices to authenticate.
3. UPnP was interfering with FreeSWITCH, and probably my Nokia. Turning that off on the router fixed FreeSWITCH.
4. Selecting some settings on the router made the routers wireless interface disappear, and the only way to get it back was a factory reset.

So, FreeSWITCH is a breeze to set up for PennyTel now. It takes editing two files.
conf/vars.xml and conf/dialplan/default/000pennytel.xml.

In conf/vars.xml I changed the following

<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_password=whateveryouwant"/>

That password is used for phones authenticating to FreeSWITCH, it has nothing to do with PennyTel.


<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="domain=switch.gruntnet"/>


What the phones use as their realm, it should be in the DNS with the ip pointing to FreeSWITCH.


<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider=sip.pennytel.com"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_username=61281955555"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_password=55555/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_from_domain=sip.pennytel.com"/>
<!-- true or false -->
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_register=true"/>
<X-PRE-PROCESS cmd="set" data="default_provider_contact=1000"/>


All the PennyTel setting goes above, I use 1000 to receive incoming calls, my only phone on the network.

Then in conf/dialplan/default/000penntel.xml


<extension name="pennytel">
<condition field="destination_number" expression="^(.*)$">
<action application="set" data="effective_caller_id_number=61281955555"/>
<action application="bridge" data="sofia/gateway/sip.pennytel.com/$1"/>
</condition>
</extension>