Setup

When the product arrived, I opened the box to find a small plastic device about the size of a novel. It arrived with a power supply, antenna, Ethernet cable and a printed manual.

The gateway has a removable panel on the bottom that reveals the SIM card slot. It has an SMA type connector for the antenna and the antenna itself includes a 2m attached cable.

Figure 1: MV-370 close up

The device boots up with a default IP address of 192.168.0.100. But since my LAN is on a different subnet, I used a crossover cable to access the device's internal web server and enable DHCP. Then I put it on my network and it acquired a more appropriate IP address from my router.

I later discovered that you can also define the gateway's basic network settings via an interactive voice menu accessed by calling the gateway from a cell phone. This menu is only available in the initial 20 seconds after the device boots, while the front panel light marked "Mobile" is flashing.

Configuration #1: Use With A Hosted IP-PBX

When the gateway was initially delivered, I was a bit short on time to experiment with its configuration. The fastest way to get a little experimentation in before I left on a business trip was to link the device to a hosted IP-PBX service that I use for my day job. This initial configuration took only about half an hour.

In the admin portal for the hosted PBX, I set up a new user. This resulted in a set of login credentials that I loaded into realm 1 on the MV-370's Service Domain settings menu. This menu supports settings for three separate SIP registrars, each referred to as a "realm."

As a convenience, you can enable or disable each without losing the settings. The gateway places all outgoing IP calls through the first available realm. But it will answer incoming IP calls from any enabled realm.

With the new credentials loaded, and after the usual reboot, the status for the server was shown as "registered" (Figure 2), which I also confirmed with the provider's management portal (Figure 3).

Figure 2: Realm indicating registered on the gateway web interface

Figure 2: Successful registration on the hosted ip-pbx administrative interface

Tags: Asterisk, GSM, How To, Portech, VoIP,

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