IPKall Numbers Straight Into Asterisk

IPKall, which is run by the fine folks at International Telecom Ltd., provides a free service that lets you map a PSTN number in the 360 area code in the US to any SIP URL. While this works for service providers like Free World Dialup, it also works if you have an Asterisk server with either dynamic DNS or a static IP.

I have used this service to make my Asterisk server’s voice menu (i.e. how to reach me) and my voicemail accessible from different PSTN numbers. I have other SIP accounts with inbound DIDs of course, but I thought this was a nice way to use a “Free” service.

In my sip.conf on Asterisk, I have an entry like:

[666]
;ipkall
type=peer
dtmfmode=rfc2833
context=home
insecure=very
nat=no

In the default section of sip.conf, I have defined the default context as from-sip. So in that section of extensions.conf, I have:

[from-sip]
exten => 666,1,Goto(voice-menu,s,1)
exten => 666,2,Hangup

This basically takes the incoming call and routes it to my voice menu system. I’ve done something similar for a PSTN backdoor into the voicemail system (i.e. have similar lines in sip.conf and extensions.conf).

In IPKall’s configuration, I have:

SIP Phone Number: 666
SIP Proxy: IP-of-my-asterisk-server:port

After about a half an hour (the time it takes for IPKall to propagate changes), my Asterisk server is reachable from the PSTN without relying on a third party service (e.g. Free World Dialup).