Hey, It's great seeing more and more people trying or thinking about trying asterisk.
For VoIP / ITSP voip-info.org has a great wiki with listings of Companies around the world. http://voip-info.org/wiki/view/VOIP+Service+Providers http://voip-info.org/wiki/view/VOIP+Service+Providers+Residential I would recommend for your test system you go with a pay-as-you go type plan with a low monthly commitment (for a DID if required). Do some research (using voip-info and others) for reviews on the company. Some of the companies have small reviews in the comment section (at the bottom) of the providers voip-info wiki page. As John pointed out CallerID is provided by your telco either the VoIP provider or your landline. With VoIP providers its (mostly) a standard feature. Good idea to check anyways. Also, CNAM or CallerID name is not provided by very many VoIP providers (yet). Fax inbound/outbound is another thing not provided by many VoIP providers (yet). I have a X101P (the X100P knockoff card). They are great (because they are cheap, $25~) for getting your feet wet with Asterisk hardware. They do come with issues though. Including no built-in echo cancellation (only software, Asterisk). NCQ sharing issues (can't be sharing NCQ at all, most of the time can be easily fixed). You will also be required to do some work with your kernel (for 2.4 need to rebuild, 2.6 you can just load a module). The other problem I had was volume. You need to play around with txgain and rxgain to get the volume just right. Personally I like my X101P and would not return it, but I think the Sipura SPA-3000 would be the right way to go (mind you its SIP only, unless I am mistaken). The Sipura SPA-3000 has it's advantages with things such as built-in echo cancellation you can also configure it to fail-over to the PSTN/FXO should Asterisk become unavailable. This fail-over would only work on the phone plugged into the FXS on the Sipura device. Now, just because there is only one FXS port does not mean you can't run more then one phone off of it (as long as most of them are powered phones). I have not tryed this with a SPA-3000 but I don't see why you would not be able to plug the FXS port into the DMARC of your house to power all your phone lines. Of course this means only 1 call at a time (unless you use the flash trick, apparently if you flash you can get a 2nd outgoing call on the same pair of copper wire). I hocked my unlocked PAP2 to my 2nd pair of copper wire in my house (my second physical line) and now the entire 2nd line in my house is VoIP. The unlocked Linksys PAP2 device does not support IAX (unless there is some custom firmware I am missing). It's a great little device that does what I need it to do. You may have a hard time unlocking it / may not be able to unlock it at all as I don't know what firmware Vonage Canada is currently pushing. If you want to try this route make sure you buy the PAP2 from a store with a good / open return policy. Also, make sure you read the instructions on how to unlock it carefully! (If you need these you can email me or post a msg to the list, google also works). "and I'm trying to show her that VoIP doesn't bite." You will need to look into QoS (Quality of Service) as well. If someone is sending large email attachments or downloading while making a VoIP call, it can have weird affects. Being a self described "Linux nutjob" ill recommend m0n0wall or even a WRT54G-L (runs linux). The WRT54G-L can even run Asterisk if your not familiar with it. Of course you can't run any PCI hardware on it like the X101P card but combined with a Sipura SPA-3000 and you have a deadly combo. Ill email along some links and such off-list. This email got incredibly long.. fast. Blaine
