asterisk pager ivrPosted 2026-02-16 For those of you who don't know, I have been helping Shadytel Midwest (headed by joe_z) provide telephony services at VCF Midwest since VCFMW 18 (2023). One of the many NEW and EXCITING services we offered for VCFMW 20 was POCSAG paging. This was done via a HME Wireless I-Station transmitter provided by Incompetel. The more traditional use for this is those restaurant "your table is ready" pager coasters, but they work with POCSAG pagers with minimal fuss. We needed a way to interface with it via the telephone network. For the VCFMW network, we try to minimize our use of Asterisk or other soft-switch platforms, but I happened to have experience with building IVRs in Asterisk as it was what we used for our phone system at a previous job (which I managed). The I-Station has an Ethernet interface and supports sending it commands via HTTP. Asterisk has the ability to poke HTTP via the built-in CURL() function. So to not slow down the momentum of preparing for VCFMW 20, we elected to go ahead with using Asterisk for this purpose. It worked surprisingly well! There will be work to port this to Cisco TCL so it can run on an ISR voice gateway. The main reason for this is the network already utilizes them, so eliminating the Asterisk PC saves a little bit of power and space for other fun hardware to be attached to the network. However, I think there is value in sharing this, as it is an example (albeit not perfect) on a way you can build an IVR to interface with an HTTP endpoint using Asterisk. Collecting user input and submitting it to the endpoint is the easy part. The hard part is validating user input, error handling, and making sure you accomodate for all the edge cases when things don't flow as expected. At any rate, I hope someone finds this helpful!
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