What to do with older notebook ?

by Joaquin F. Telco CEO

For sure most of us have some older and obsolete notebook at home.
You can sell it at eBay for 20 buckets or better than that ... continue reading.

I used and old computer ( of course if you like the experience and don't have it, you can get some raspberry Pi, nano Pi, Olilinux and so on ) to build a cheap home data/voice network.

Of course ... Linux. Any Linux distribution will be fine.
I used Slackware, but most Linux distributions are ok too.

First of all I seek for a cheap 3G/4G modem stick at eBay, that costs me around 6 euro. Don't worry about your dongle, you don't need voice , so most of then will work.

Next steep I got a WIFI dongle, here you can find many cheap ones ( around 5 euro ) at Amazon or eBay. I would suggest to buy one without Realtek firmware, if you are concerned about privacity and privative firmware.

Now I configured wpasupplicant to connect my dongle to the internet, using a cheap prepayed SIM card ( 8 Euro+VAT /mo ) flat data rate.

I configured then iptables to allow other computers in the lan can get access to the internet. You need just two rules for PREROUTING and POSTROUTING, or use MASQUERADE , through my PC.

I got some ip phones , really I have several ones, Lynksis SPA2200, SPA3000, Polycom, etc.
Also I downloaded some app for SIP VoIP voice protocol like Zoiper or Sipdroid.

I configured my PC as Access Point using hostapd software and the WIFI dongle, so my mobile phones are now able to connect through this computer WIFI to the internet.

Next step I ordered some DiD ( phone numbers ) from my VoIP provider.
These numbers are routed to my SIP account of course.

Of course if you wanna to play more complex scenario you can install Asterisk or other PBX software you like.

3G/4G dongle doesn't give me enough bandwidth and low latency to play video, but is fine for browsing, email and more or less 3 simultaneous voice calls.

If you have no any ATA ( like Linksys SPA3000 ) or ip phone that includes low bandwidth voice codec g.729ab you can choose GSM codec , that is royalty free.

The result is for just 8 Euro/mo +VAT fixed cost I got internet at home with 3-4 connected computers and also 3-4 simultaneous phone calls.

Sources:
http://www.asterisk.org
http://www.955170000.com
http://www.zoiper.com