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FreePBX phone system

Phone Booth

Article from ADMIN 88/2025

By Martin Loschwitz

FreePBX is a first-class replacement for commercial phone systems, even in complex setups.

Traditional mobile telephony still plays an important role in the small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) sector, although traditional analog telephony has practically disappeared. The majority of long-distance calls are now made by Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and the classic routers have long included small phone systems.

In a private environment, this is the end of the story for telephony, but in a commercial environment you have to use other technologies. The requirements in offices with many phones for voice menus, queues, call forwarding, and other features go far beyond what the usual communication applications can provide.

Open source advocates regularly cite Asterisk [1] as an alternative to a commercial phone system, but many people are wary of using it. Asterisk is a complex beast, and even connecting the software to a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunk is not a trivial undertaking. FreePBX [2], on the other hand, the most widely used free Asterisk distribution, promises to protect you as much as possible against the unreasonable demands Asterisk makes on your skill level.

Getting started is not a piece of cake, even with FreePBX. In this article, I help you set up a phone system with FreePBX and adapt it to your needs. It covers basic topics such as the required hardware and the correct setup, as well as recommended settings for performance and security and complex advanced topics such as a digital fax that is based on HylaFAX [3]. To this day, faxing is still necessary in some countries because it is still the only legally binding form of communication besides snail mail.

At the end of the day, you should have a fully configured FreePBX with fax function that supports call forwarding to external numbers, queues, recorded messages, and various other

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