How to configure FreePBX for OVH’s SIP trunk

Posted on by Jan

I’m still kind of an Asterisk/FreePBX noob so I took me a while to figure out how to configure OVH’s SIP trunk for inbound and outbound calls. I chose OVH since they offer a SIP trunk for €1/mo (depending on your country the price may be higher) which includes free landline calling to 40 countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Cyprus, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, Luxembourg, Malaysia , Mexico, Norway, Netherlands, New Zealand, Panama, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, USA and Venezuela to a maximum of 99 different numbers per month.
You can choose a phone number from various countries and for some countries, OVH even offers free number portability for your existing landline number.

Since OVH wants me to dial the numbers (even local ones) with an international 00 prefix, I had to add a rule to manipulate the numbers stored in my phone book. I also added the G.722 wideband codec to the list of supported codecs since this is what my Fritzbox supports natively. There’s a codec menu in OVH’s manager interface which lets you choose additional codecs like G.722. Make sure to watch Asterisk’s log file for all kind of errors until everything runs smoothly. By the way, FreePBX/Asterisk is running very stable on my Raspberry Pi using the RasPBX distro.

While it’s obviously tempting to use OVH’s SIP trunk for landline calls, some of their international mobile rates are rather high. For instance, the rate to call a Swiss mobile phone is around €0.40/minute. The real rate seems to be €0.146/minute according to my tests. The Swiss mobile rate OVH publishes in their list doesn’t seem to be correct.

Trunk

General Settings
Trunk Name: 41nn519nnnn
Outbound Caller ID: 0041nn519nnnn

Dialed Number Manipulation Rules (sample for Switzerland, not needed anymore (see first comment))
() +  | 

Outbound settings
Trunk Name: 0041nn519nnnn

PEER Details
type=peer
context=from-trunk
host=sip.ovh.ch
language=de
insecure=very
username=0041nn519nnnn
secret=yourpassword
nat=yes
canreinvite=no
dtmfmode=auto
video=no
restrictcid=no
amaflags=default
disallow=all
allow=ulaw&alaw&g722

Registration
0041nn519nnnn:yourpassword@sip.ovh.ch/0041nn519nnnn

Inbound Route

Description: 41nn519nnnn
DID Number: 0041nn519nnnn

Don’t forget to set a destination extension.

Outbound Route

Route Name: 41nn519nnnn
Route CID: 0041nn519nnnn

Dial Patterns that will use this Route (very basic, not safe if you have multiple outbound routes)
() +  |  / 

Trunk Sequence for Matched Routes
Choose the OVH trunk you created earlier.

Related posts:

  1. How to batch-import a phone number blacklist into Asterisk/FreePBX

5 thoughts on “How to configure FreePBX for OVH’s SIP trunk”

  1. A

    Are you still using OVH? How is your experience with them with regards to call quality? I’m considering them since there seem to be no decent VoIP offers from Switzerland based companys – at least for private customers and for less than 10.- per month.

    Greetings from Zug

    • Jan

      I do. Including the 1 hour mobile “flat rate”. Works pretty good but I’m not sure if that option is still available.

      Cheers,
      Jan

      • A

        Thank you for sharing your experience with OVH. The flatrate option is still available (1h for 3.99 Euro monthly/3h for 9.99 Euro monthly). The ping time is also pretty good (35ms, compared to 26ms with netvoip.ch which is connected to swissIX in Zurich). One catch is the authentication they require for new customers: Did you have to send them a ID copy?

        • Jan

          I’m sure I had to do this at some point. I’m using a ton of OVH services, they may have had my ID already on file when I ordered the VOIP plan.

          Cheers,
          Jan

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