So I decided that it would be fun to play around with Call Manager Express in my home lab and get some experience with SIP and Cisco voice technologies. Initially, I held back from playing around with it since I didn’t want to pay for DIDs and SIP trunks (despite them being very reasonable) just for a lab environment. After some googling, I came up with this…
Free SIP trunks for lab testing! What a steal! I’ve had some brief communications with the guys over at SIP-UA and they are very helpful. It works like this…
-All lab users share a single DID. When you call the DID, it asks you for your lab extension (you get assigned one when you sign up) and then forwards the call to you.
-Outbound calling is allowed in the US but limited to 2 minutes
-No monthly fees, no commitments, and no contracts
Pretty cool huh? I’m a big fan and I think it’s really nice of the guys over there to offer this service to people who are trying to learn the technology.
In the next post, I’m going to a single phone base CME setup using a SIP-UA SIP trunk.
I think this is one of the best free offer I’ve heard of in a very long time. It’s great that someone is willing to do this all for educational benefit. I’m looking forward to signing up for it in the near future.
Yeah, the guy that runs it is really awesome. Very cool of him to offer this.
On the flip side, if you want a full SIP trunk of your own they are pretty cheap these days. I setup a Asterisk server for home phone a couple of months ago and the SIP trunks are very reasonable. Ping me if you want more info on that, I’ve been meaning to do a post on that setup.