When I first saw the SwissVoice Voice Bridge I thought it would be a great way to make sure I didn’t miss calls from my landline, which I only really keep for nostalgia and “reduced’ broadband pricing. However, after a bit of a delay the initial reviews after release weren’t very promising and I started to wonder if I could do this better using open source software.
A little googling led me to a video by Wayne Hackman in which he’d used FreePBX on a Raspberry Pi to create an Asterisk server and used a LinkSys SPA3102 as a bridge between his telephone line and FreePBX. A search for an SPA3102 led me to an Amazon Marketplace seller who had some refurbished SPA3102 units for about £40 – as luck would have it I still had some Amazon vouchers from Christmas and coupled with the RaspberryPi 2 I had on my desk meant I could (hopefully) build my own “Voice Bridge” for about £15 hard cash.
Thanks to RaspPBX installing and setting up FreePBX and Asterisk on my Raspberry Pi 2 was a breeze. Setting up the SPA3102 took a little more work as the only guides I could find were for the USA and France, and it’s easy to get FXO and FXS ports mixed up.
After some failed attempts I got everything working together and set up Zoiper on my iPhone to make and receive calls. At this point, I decided that my PPTP VPN wasn’t secure enough so I spent another week setting up StrongSwan on my Ubuntu 12.04 server to provide an IKEv2 VPN with certificate authentication.