Aska

Setting up a conference call in Asterisk Confbridge

In this post, I will show you how to set up a simple conference room in Asterisk with the function conf bridge.

Requirement

• Asterisk 16 or 18
• Default sip accounts

What is a conference call

A conference call is a call with multiple participants. Most commonly, people join conference calls by dialing a shared conference number on their phones.

How to set up a conference in Asterisk confbridge

To be able to use the Asterisk conference call function, we'll need to add a few parameters to our confbridge.conf file. First, let's move to our Asterisk directory and open the confbridge.conf file.

$ cd /etc/asterisk
$ vi /confbridge.conf

Now let's add the following parameters to the bottom of our conf bridge file and save it.

# confbridge.conf
[admin_user]
type=user
pin=5555
marked=yes
admin=yes
music_on_hold_when_empty=yes
announce_user_count=yes

[default_user]
type=user
pin=1234
wait_marked=yes
end_marked=yes
music_on_hold_when_empty=yes
announce_user_count=yes

[myconferenceroom]
type=bridge
max_members=10

In this example, we have created a conference room with an administrator and a default user. This is a very basic conference room for asterisk.

Want to tweak your conference a bit more, take a look at this asterisk wiki that shows you all the parameters that you can use within the conf bridge file.

How to set up a conference in Asterisk the dial plan

The next step is to create our asterisk dial plan in our extensions.conf file. Let's first open this file.

$ vi /extensions.conf

Now let's add the administrator dial plan.

# extensions.conf
exten => 777,1,Progress()
exten => 777,2,Wait(1)
exten => 777,3,ConfBridge(1,myconferenceroom,admin_user)

Next is the guest dial plan.

# extensions.conf
exten => 666,1,Progress()
exten => 666,2,Wait(1)
exten => 666,3,ConfBridge(1,myconferenceroom,default_user)

Before we can start testing, we'll need to restart our Asterisk PBX, this can be done with the following command.

$ systemctl restart asterisk

Our dial plan is ready to get tested. Let us know in the comment below how your test went.