Honey, I Supersized the House!

By Will Perry,  Microsoft Student Partner.

I need to get something off my chest. I’m a technophile. I love the idea of the home of the future – where everything is integrated, where your TV does more than just let you watch big brother and your phones do more than just let your mum nag you. Unlike most (sane) people, I’ve invested some of my time in trying to turn my little pad down here in London into a home of the future, and I’m going to share those experiences with you!

This is the first of a three part guide to supersizing your home often using free software or inexpensive hardware, we’ll look at supersizing your digital media experience in part two, and wrap up in part three with a supersized home network and a sneaky peak at Windows Home Server. Today, however, we’re going to look at supersizing your home phone system.

How would you like to equip your home with the same kind of phone technology as a small business? Perhaps extensions around the home, allowing you to call your flatmate while you’re in the kitchen and see how many sugars they want in their tea, or transfer a call from your mum to the speaking clock. Maybe you’d like to save a few pounds by routing calls over the net, or perhaps you’d like to use an auto attendant to filter calls to the right people. We’ll have a brief look at how to accomplish all this (and a little more) as well as giving you a few ideas about automating your home directly from the phones.

At the heart of any private phone network is a PBX (a Private Branch Exchange, for those of you interested) – you can ask BT for one of these, but it’ll cost you thousands, so personally, I wouldn’t bother. My PBX of choice is Axon by a company called NCH Swift Sound, Axon lets you connect a variety of phones, lines and internet technologies to your phone network and best of all its totally free. You can (and should) get Axon from nch.com.au/pbx. Axon runs on Windows 2000 and above.

Installing Axon and a piece of phone software of your choice (Express Talk Basic and Xlite are two great free options) is all you actually need to get your home phone system working. By default Axon will install 10 Extension numbers (101 thru 110), voicemail and an On Hold music player – not bad for free, eh?

After a few hours making calls between the PCs in your home, you’ll probably be pretty bored, so let’s add the ability to call people in the real world, and them to call you. For this we need a VOIP provider – that’s a company which provides telephone services over the internet, allowing you to make really cheap calls worldwide, and typically free calls to other users of their network. Two great examples of VOIP Providers are sipGate (https://www.sipgate.co.uk/) who provide you with a free fixed line number and call rates much lower than BT, or voipStunt (https://www.voipstunt.com), a company willing to give you totally FREE calls (yes, Free. I think that’s pretty good!). Sign up with one of those providers (for free) and add them to Axon by logging in to the web interface, Clicking “External Lines”, then Add. Next head to the “Dialling Plans” section of Axon and add a rule to allow you to make calls through your new line. You can repeat this for as many phone lines as you like. You’ll find now that dialling the external number you have (from sipgate) will make the soft phones on your home network ring, also that you can call people in the real world using your PC!

Soon you’ll start thinking about how great it would be if you could make and receive all these calls through a traditional handset – and you can. There are two options, either a hideously named SIP FXS Adapter a SIP Phone. Both of these devices connect to your home network, your PBX and a phone of some description. An FXS adapter allows you to use a BT phone with your VOIP PBX (Axon), this is certainly the cheapest way to start making cheap calls with a real phone, and it’s worth checking if your broadband router has FXS ports  attached to it – many do, and this makes the whole process free! SIP Phones are slightly more expensive (from £30-£100, typically) but offer more advanced functionality like call transfer, call waiting and taking several calls at once. Simply configure the Phone (or FXS Adapter) as one of the extensions setup in Axon, and Bingo – you’re ready to make free calls around your home and across the globe!

From here, there is loads you can do – perhaps use FXO technology to route calls to and from a BT landline? Maybe use the Microsoft Real Time Communications SDK to build a .NET application allowing you to control parts of your home network? You could even download the Windows Speech Server 2007 trial and experiment with creating your own automated voice response system. Next time, we’ll be looking at media within the home, and how to get a really great entertainment experience all around your home –why not combine the two, and automate your media collection using the phone system?

If you’ve got questions, comments, or get up to anything related to beefing up your home phone system – drop me an email at will@will-perry.co.uk.