What is a VICIdial phone entry?

A VICIdial phone entry is the account that a physical phone or a software phone registers to before it can ring. Think of it as the slot in the system that says "this device exists, here is its name, here is its password, and here is the server it belongs to." Without that slot, the device has nowhere to log in and the agent sitting in front of it cannot take a single call.

You manage these entries under ADMIN, then PHONES. That screen is where every device your call center uses gets defined, one row per phone. A Softphone on a laptop, a desk handset, or a browser-based Webphone all need one of these entries to point at.

What the entry actually holds

Each phone entry stores the details a device needs to authenticate and behave correctly. The most important pieces are the phone extension (the device's name as Asterisk sees it), the dialplan number you dial to make it ring, the server it lives on, and two separate passwords. One password is for logging into the web agent interface; the other, the Registration Password, is the secret the device uses to register over the network. People mix those two up constantly, so it helps to keep them straight from day one.

When you save a new phone, VICIdial creates the matching Asterisk configuration on its own. For a SIP or IAX device that auto-created config appears within about a minute, which is when the device can finally connect. The act of a device authenticating against the entry is called Phone registration, and once it succeeds the phone shows as reachable.

How a phone entry becomes a live agent

A phone entry on its own is not yet an agent. It is the hardware-facing half. When a person opens the agent screen and logs in, VICIdial connects their session to a phone entry, and the audio path runs through that registered device. So the chain runs from device, to phone entry, to agent session.

flowchart LR
  Device[Softphone or deskphone] --> Register[Registers to phone entry]
  Register --> Entry[Phone entry in ADMIN PHONES]
  Entry --> Server[Lives on a server IP]
  Entry --> Login[Agent logs in]
  Login --> Session[Agent session with audio]
  Session --> Call[Takes calls]

Read the diagram left to right. The device registers, the entry tells the system where it lives and how to reach it, and only then does an Agent logging in get connected to live audio. If any link in that chain is wrong, the agent hears silence or cannot log in at all.

Why the naming matters

The phone extension field is the device name without the protocol or the slash in front of it. For a SIP device shown to Asterisk as SIP/test101, the phone extension is just test101. For SIP and IAX devices the extension must contain no dashes and no spaces or special punctuation, only letters and numbers. Get that naming wrong and the auto-generated config will not match what the device sends, so it never registers.

The dialplan number is different from the extension. The extension is the device's identity; the dialplan number is the digits you dial internally to ring that device. Keeping those two concepts apart is one of the first things that makes the PHONES screen feel less confusing.

Where to go next

If you want the wider picture of how phones, registration, and the dialplan all fit together, the VICIdial phones guide ties the whole cluster into one map. For the single field that trips up most newcomers, read what the VICIdial phone extension is, which goes deeper on naming rules.

If standing up phone entries, servers, and the full agent screen yourself sounds like more plumbing than you want to own, VICIfast provisions a hardened VICIdial server with all of it ready to go in under 40 seconds. See our pricing for what each plan includes, then come back here when you need to add your first phone.