Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, 2nd Edition

Connecting to a SIP Service Provider

With the advent of Internet telephony, there has been an influx of Internet-based phone companies springing up all over the world! This gives you a large number of choices from which to choose. Many of these service providers allow you to connect your Asterisk-based system to their networks,^[66] and some of them are even running Asterisk themselves!

The following configuration should get you connected with an Internet Telephony Service Provider (ITSP),^[67] although it is impossible to know the unique configurations each service provider will require from you, and ideally the provider will give you the configuration required to connect your system with its own. However, not all are going to support Asterisk, so we’re going to provide you with a generic configuration which should help you get on your way and, ideally, going in a matter of minutes:

[my_service_provider]
type=peer
host=10.251.55.100
fromuser=my_unique_id
secret=my_special_secret
context=incoming_calls
dtmfmode=rfc2833
disallow=all
allow=gsm
allow=ulaw
deny=0.0.0.0/0
permit=10.251.55.100/32
insecure=invite

Configuring a Local Firewall

If you’re running iptables on the same machine as the Asterisk box, then you can run the following commands to open port 5060 for SIP signaling, and ports 10,000 through 20,000 for the RTP traffic. You can also narrow the range of RTP ports in the rtp.conf file located in /etc/asterisk. An excellent book on iptables firewalls is Linux Firewalls by Steve ...