VoIP with Anveo and OBi202
I recently switched my parents’ phone to use voip, and have been pleased with it so far. I went with Anveo for porting over the phone number and for phone service. To connect regular phones to phone jack I bought a OBi202 for around $100.
My parents used to pay $23/month for phone service. Now I believe they can pay less than $5/month. The savings would cover the switching cost after 6 months and after that it’s all savings.
This post highlights some cool features and also talk about some tips for anyone who wants to use similar setup.
Cool Features
I looked around at voip providers and chose Anveo because I liked the feature set I saw. Below are some of the features that I enjoy:
- Fax support (Send fax online, and receive fax via email)
- Call flow (Design how you want incoming calls handled)
- For example, I configured my call flow to require callers who block caller ID to do something extra, in order to reduce telemarketing.
- Quick dial (E.g. dial “03#” for calling my aunt)
- Call history
Custom CallerID Numbers
Anveo has this feature that allows you to call using any phone number you own. For example, I can configure it so that I can use voip to call somebody with my cell phone number as the caller ID. All I have to do is dial * followed by 2 digits (aka star codes) and then the actual phone number I want to dial.
On Anveo side, configuration for this is found in My Account -> Account Preferences -> Custom CallerID Numbers.
The one tricky thing about this is that OBi202 needs to allow this kind of dial pattern through to Anveo. You need to go into OBi202 configuration for “ITSP Profile A General” and fix up the DigitMap.
This was my DigitMap and it didn’t allow star codes.
(
1xxxxxxxxxx|
<1>[2-9]xxxxxxxxx|
011xx.|
xx.|
(Mipd)|
[^*#]@@.
)I modified it to include the star code associated on Anveo side with my cell phone number.
(
1xxxxxxxxxx|
<1>[2-9]xxxxxxxxx|
011xx.|
xx.|
(Mipd)|
[^*#]@@.|
*20xxxxxxxxxx|
*201xxxxxxxxxx
)