How To Configure Asterisk PBX For Aussie Broadband

An old Bakelite rotary dial phone is appropriately anachronistic for a post about VoIP configuration.

I recently moved the company to use Aussie Broadband for our nbn®©™ connection to the Internet, and that meant reconfiguring the VoIP service.

We use an Asterisk-based PBX (FreePBX) so we can have softphones and hold music and automatic call recording and a bunch of other stuff that a company our size doesn’t need, but it’s fun to be able to nerd it up.

This adds certain… challenges… when we try to connect to service providers used to dealing with ordinary punters, not nerds.

The information available on ISP websites for configuring anything other than whatever brand of VoIP phone they sell is usually next to non-existent. Sometimes you get lucky wading around in the backwaters of Whirlpool but even then the information is often wildly out of date.

I figured it out though, using a combination of familiarity with Asterisk and knowing how to diagnose a protocol issue through judicious use of Google and debug logs.

Basic Config Requirements

Aussie Broadband don’t send you the login and password for the VoIP service. It’s not the same as your web portal password, and probably isn’t the same as whatever authentication you might otherwise have to use. HFC nbn doesn’t have any username/password authentication to get the basic IP stuff running.

You need to call Aussie Broadband support to get your VoIP login credentials. This is pretty painless.

The username is a string of (usually) eight numbers. For this post I’m going to make one up so you can see where it should go: 44339898

Your password will be a random string of eight letters and numbers. Again, here’s a made up one I’ll use in this post: 43tb78er

You’ll need to configure Asterisk with your public IP address assigned by Aussie Broadband. We have a static IP, so this is easy. In FreePBX you set the External Address to this IP address in the General SIP Settings part of the Asterisk SIP Settings, under NAT Settings.

If you have a dynamic IP, you’ll need to go into the Chan SIP settings and set your IP configuration to Dynamic IP and follow the instructions.

Trunk Configuration

The main magic happens in the SIP Trunk you configure that connects to the upstream SIP server run by Aussie Broadband. Its address (at time of writing) is AussieBB.nms1.voice.wide.net.au. Check this with support when you ring to get your username and password.

Inbound Calls

The USER Context should be set to your username. For our example: 44339898

In the User Details pane, you set parameters like this:

username=44339898
type=peer
context=from-trunk

The Register String will need to include your actual phone number as well if you want your indial pattern matching to work, so that Asterisk knows how to handle incoming calls to your number. For this example, let’s assume your number is (03) 5555 2424.

It’s of the form:

<username>:<password>@<voip_server>/<your_number>

so with our example parameters this would be:

44339898:[email protected]/0355552424

You should now be able to receive calls to your number.

Outbound Calls

This is a bit odd, hence my writing up this blog.

To start with, Aussie Broadband doesn’t seem to do CallerID the way others do. You have to set your Display Name and the CallerID number to your username. You do this in the General tab of the Trunk settings in FreePBX, as the Outbound CallerID setting:

"44339898" <44339898>

Secondly, Aussie Broadband expects a domain setting in outbound calls that has little-to-no relation to anything else you’ve seen so far. The magic string is “AussieBB” and without it, the server will respond with 403 Unauthorized errors whenever you try to make a call.

In FreePBX, you set things up in the Outgoing tab for the trunk, in the PEER Details area. Here are ours, with the values changes to the example ones we’re using for the post.

username=44339898
secret=43tb78er
type=peer
qualify=yes
qualifyfreq=60
progressinband=yes
prematuremedia=no
insecure=invite,port
host=AussieBB.nms1.voice.wide.net.au
fromdomain=AussieBB

The magic setting there is the fromdomain=AussieBB.

Happy dialling!

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7 Comments

  1. Was super excited to see this solution to my exact problem. Sadly it has not worked for me. I get registration to AussieBB, but when I dial I get this:
    chan_sip.c: Received response: “Forbidden” from ‘;tag=as3d2fd9ca’

    Which is what I was getting before I tried the fromdomain=AussieBB.

    I’d love to hear if there are any new ideas on what I might be doing wrong.

  2. Forgive my last reply. Its fixed now!!

    The Outbound CID had to also be set as the userID in the Outbound Route settings.

    Still some work to get this working on multiple extensions it seems, but definite progress.

  3. Justin, how many outgoing calls are you able to make simultaneously using the AussieBB account/trunk over FreePBX? It seems that I am limited to 2 even though I have bandwidth to make many more than that. Using other VOIP providers there are unlimited calls at the one time.

  4. I’ve not tried. 2 is pretty common with Aussie ISPs I’ve found, unless you sign up for a higher level of VoIP service which is more of a business PBX plan, but they’re super expensive. You’re better off going with a specialist VoIP provider other than your ISP if you want to make a lot of calls/have lots of lines.

  5. Thanks for the info, helped me sort out my incoming route there isnt a lot of info regarding AussieBB VoIP.

  6. Does not appear to work with TPG. Their modem’s have a custom firmware to do voip/sip, they don’t have a backup option to export and they do not provide the details to import into other NBN ready modems (the internet is fine, just not the voip).
    I believe there is currently a complaint with the ACCC over this in the recent months, and I hope it forces the issue – I don’t want to change ISP.

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