Last week, I wrote about how our phone numbers have evolved into a unique, static ID that companies abuse to track us. As anecdotal evidence, I mentioned that “I personally had my last phone number for well over a decade before I finally got rid of cell service altogether in favor of the ‘living on Wi-Fi 24/7’ model.” This prompted an email from a reader asking me to elaborate. Why not?
I tried that, actually. It didn’t work out for me.
Set up my own VoIP server, got a phone number registered with it, set up all the infrastructure, got the firewall to play nice, etc. It worked great for phone calls (and the voicemail and call queues were awesome), but I couldn’t get SMS/MMS integrated into the VoIP server let alone any of the softphone clients. Most of my friends/family use SMS/MMS rather than [insert app here] so I was never able to drop the SIM card, so to speak.
May try again at some point, but as of 2020, I just couldn’t make it work.
Hey out of curiosity what software did you use for setting that up? What did the final stack look like?
Asterisk was setup with local, 4 digit extensions. My DIDs from the trunk provider came into the SIP registration endpoint, and the admin panel with the provider allowed setting up virtual numbers. Each DID was mapped to a virtual extension with the provider which was then used in the Asterisk dial plan so two devices could have different DIDs and default outbound numbers (e.g. simulating two completely different lines).
I had Asterisk’s TLS and RTP ports exposed to the world so I didn’t need VPN on the client devices (non-TLS SIP port wasn’t exposed). Client softphones were configured to use SRTP for media security. The exposed SIP port necessitated setting up/tuning Fail2Ban to keep spam / brute force attempts at bay.
I did get text messaging to work within Asterisk (SIP client to SIP client), but not through the VoIP trunk. The SMS/MMS endpoint from the trunk was a REST API that I could not get integrated into Asterisk. I had some minor luck getting the SMS REST API bridged into XMPP, but I couldn’t get XMPP to bridge to Asterisk in a way that worked with the SIP messaging.
I just gave up on that due to lack of time.
Wow thank you for such an informative response!