VoIP In the lab!

I had felt that things had "stagnated" in the lab, so I wanted to start a new project. This new project resulted in the addition of VoIP to my lab environment.

I initially invested in some Cisco 7961-GE's to get introduced to VoIP/SIP/PBX and they worked pretty spot-on for a while. I also picked 3CX as my PBX/SIP solution.

After experimenting with what I had, I decided to take it a step further and purchase a SIP Trunk and allow out-bound calling from my lab to further my experiment.

After that, I was introduced to a model of VoIP / Cloud PBX phone called the Cisco Meraki MC74. This phone was a cloud-managed VoIP phone for enterprise networks. I invested in two of them, and began work to integrate them into my lab.

Essentially, they're touchscreen desk phones that run Android, so I can load whatever SIP client I want and connect to my PBX server. The whole process is documented on github here.

The project is now over, but it was a runaway success. I had gotten both phones successfully connecting to my 3CX PBX Server, and had been actively contributing to the project on Github.