This past weekend, I had a chance to test out all of the named technologies, all together–including the cloud.

The news last week was that Asterisk 1.8 connects directly to Google Voice via the Google Talk protocol. No more scripts or free DIDs to act as intermediary. And if you’ve set up GTalk with Asterisk on previous versions, it’s simple to go the extra couple steps and enable Google Voice.

Tested, and it works. Thanks to Michigan Telephone who drew my attention to the Asterisk wiki where the Google Voice setup is documented. If you’re already in a place where you can install Asterisk 1.8 and want to try it out, that wiki document will take you the whole way through it. (One note, however: I have allowguest=yes, which is how this option is documented in the sample gtalk.conf, rather than allowguests=yes, which is how it is documented in the wiki, and allowguest [no s] works for me.)

While I am a huge fan of Google Voice, what was more interesting than getting that working this weekend was getting it running in the cloud–namely, Rackspace CloudServers. This was my venture into cloud VoIP, starting with dev/test, and partially out of necessity–I don’t have any more hardware at home to use for testing. I’ll give the end of the story first: it works nearly as well as my physical hardware setup at home in terms of audio quality and general calling functions, and an order of magnitude better for rapid deployment of a testing environment in which to set up the new versions of Asterisk and FreePBX. Naturally, I began to think: could I move my home PBX to the cloud? Not yet, and I have a number of technical reasons (not FUD) why, but I plan to try tackling them.

This is an introduction, and I know a number of folks stop by this blog looking for technical how-tos, so this week and next I will be digging into these topics: setting up Asterisk 1.8 and FreePBX 2.8, configuring Google Voice and nicely integrating into FreePBX (not just hacking it into the extensions_custom.conf by hand some config file editing required…), setting up a RS CloudServer for Asterisk, and some of the technical considerations I mentioned in the previous paragraph.

That’s a lot to write about, and I’ll get to it piece by piece. Meanwhile, if you want to just try it out (minus the cloud part), go get the latest Incredible PBX/PBX In A Flash from NerdVittles, install the ISO and have at it. They’ve gotten it working and bundled it together so that you can have a cutting-edge PBX… in a flash! But as for me and this blog, let’s just call it Asterisk PBX in a slow-cooker.