FreePBX Adding a Cisco SPA525G2 VoIP phone part 6

FreePBX Adding a Cisco SPA525G2 phone

After the initial setup of our FreePBX Asterisk, it’s time to add VoIP phones to our PBX so we can finally start making calls. The first to go will be the very successful, inexpensive, and easy-to-configure Cisco SPA525G2 VoIP phone. It is an improved version of the SPA525G model, differing only in the addition of Bluetooth communication, which allows us to pair our VoIP phone with any smartphone and conveniently switch calls to the smartphone.

This model has five telephone lines, which means it allows up to five telephone calls to be made simultaneously. These calls can be conveniently switched between using the backlit buttons on the right side of the screen.

The phone can be connected with a 5V power supply, or directly from a PoE switch with a LAN cable. It has a colour display with a 3.2-inch diagonal and a resolution of 320×240 pixels. The phone can be easily managed via a web browser.

Cisco SPA525G2 setting a static IP address

After connecting the phone to our LAN, the first step should be to set a static IP address instead of the one assigned dynamically by the DHCP server. To do this, press the ‘Settings’ button on the phone, and then use the cursor to navigate to ‘Network Configuration-Connection Type’ and change the mode from ‘DHCP’ to ‘Static IP’.

Now we need to set the IP address, gateway and subnet mask. So we press ‘Settings’, ‘Network Configuration’ and go to the ‘Static IP Address Settings’ by entering the following in the given fields:

1. IP Address, remembering that both our phone, FreePBX and the router must be on the same subnet. In our case, the router has the address 192.168.0.1, and FreePBX has the address 192.168.0.178. If your subnet mask has the number 255.255.255.0, then the phone’s IP address must be 192.168.0.X, where X is a number from 0 to 255. Of course, the IP address on your network must be unique, so it cannot be number 1, 178, or any other number already in use on your network.
2. Subnet mask – If you do not have more than 256 network devices on your network, it is usually 255.255.255.0.
3. Gateway address – The IP address of your router
4. DNS 1 and DNS 2 – you can enter the IP address of any DNS server, for example 1.1.1.1, 8.8.8.8, or 8.8.4.4.

Finally, we save the settings by pressing the button under the ‘Set’ label.

Cisco SPA525G2 phone settings in the web browser

Once we have set a static IP address for our phone, we launch a web browser on the computer and enter the IP address of our phone. You will then see a window with information about our phone, but only in user mode, from which we will not be able to make the changes needed to connect it to our FreePBX. To do this, we must switch to administrator mode by clicking the ‘Admin login’ link in the top right corner and entering the password. If no one has changed the password, the default login is ‘admin’ and the password is ‘admin’.

After logging in to administrator mode, we go to the ‘Ext 1’ tab, where we will have to enter a few options to connect our phone to FreePBX:

1. Proxy – we enter the IP address of our FreePBX here.
2. Register – we set to ‘yes’.
3. Display Name – we enter any name here that will identify our phone.
4. User ID – here we must enter the number of our Extension from FreePBX, which we created in the previous article.
5. Password – We enter the password we created here, when creating the Extension in FreePBX in the ‘Secret’ field.

We save the changes with the ‘Submit All Changes’ button. The other fields are not relevant at the moment.

Note: Make sure you have entered the correct Extension number in the ‘User ID’ field and the ‘Secret’ password in the ‘Password’ field. Without this, the phone will not register correctly in FreePBX.

After a while the phone will restart and if you have entered all the data correctly, the phone should already be connected to FreePBX, and you should see phone icons on the display, just like in the picture below.

If the entered data is incorrect, or for other reasons the phone cannot register with FreePBX, then you will see raised handsets with exclamation marks on the display, and the phone line buttons will light up red, just like in the picture below.

Cisco SPA525G2 telephone line configuration

By default, the Cisco SPA525G2 phone has all 5 phone lines connected to one Extension in FreePBX. But there is nothing to stop our phone from having 5 different internal numbers assigned.

Note: Oh! There’s nothing to stop our phone from handling 5 different landline numbers if we have 5 FreePBX servers connected to 5 virtual landline numbers, but that’s a story for another article.

To set different internal numbers on one phone, for each of the 5 telephone lines, we must of course have 5 different Extensions in FreePBX. You can find out how to do this in our previous guide on Extensions.

If we have already created additional Extensions in FreePBX, we can go to the ‘Ext 2’ tab by typing the IP address of our phone in the browser (don’t forget to switch to Administrator mode) and in the ‘User ID’ and ‘Password’ window, we enter the number and ‘Secret’ of our second Extension, in the ‘Proxy’ field we re-enter the IP address of our FreePBX and confirm the changes with the ‘Submit All Changes’ button.

We perform similar actions for the remaining telephone lines in the ‘Ext 3’, ‘Ext 4’ and ‘Ext 5’ tabs.

Next, we go to the ‘Phone’ tab and change the numbers in the ‘Line Key’ field for each telephone line.

Cisco SPA525G2 Friendly names instead of Extension numbers

By default, the Cisco SPA525G2 phone displays Extension numbers (using the SUSER variable) on the display, instead of friendly names, for example, Reception, Technical Department, or Orders Department. Sometimes several employees use one phone and we can assign them separate internal numbers with their names. To change this, we must go back to the ‘Phone’ tab in the browser and change the ‘Short Name’ field assigned to each telephone line. After confirming the changes with the ‘Submit All Changes’ button, friendly names should appear on our display.

An additional advantage of this solution is that now when a given employee or department calls other internal numbers, the friendly name of the internal line will also appear on the call recipient’s end, in addition to the Extension number.

Summary

We have just registered our first VoIP phone in FreePBX. It is true that we still cannot make calls to landline or mobile numbers (we will deal with this in one of the next articles), but we can already make calls to internal company numbers if we have several VoIP phones.

The Cisco SPA525G2 phone is the highest model in the SPA5xx series, very pleasant to use and easy to configure. However, not every Cisco phone is like that. For example, the great VoIP model Cisco 9971 with a large touch screen and the ability to add a camera is much more difficult to configure, because we do not change its settings from the level of the web browser, but with each change of a parameter we must create a configuration file and send it to the phone via the built-in TFTP server. But that’s a story for a completely different article.

Therefore, if you do not have much experience in configuring VoIP phones and FreePBX, before buying, make sure that your new phone will be “FreePBX Friendly”.