Hi Tim, pretty much agree with everything you wrote, except for buying $200.00 phones for every major room in the house, a little expensive for an experiment.
I bought a little box off eBay for $100.00 (PIII 933, 256 RAM, 20 Gig hard drive), I then purchased a linksys PAP2 for a little over $20.00. The PAP2 has 2 phone ports, one I plugged into the wall in my office, that livened up my whole house, that way I was able to keep and use all my existing phones, the second port I hooked up to a cheap cordless. Instead of buying an IP phone right away I played around with some of the free softphones on my laptop. Once I had it all working fairly well I signed up for an Unlimitel # and tried it out for a month or 2. Unlimitel worked out better than I expected, so I dropped Vonage and haven't looked back. So far I've spent less than $170.00 (+ $50.00 to port over my old #) including the DID and calling costs, since last November. Mark. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim St. Pierre" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Nope, nothing is really "mandatory". The big question is what you want to do with the whole thing. You are in fact better off do not use analog lines if you can avoid it. FXS ports are okay in a building if you use good quality telephones, but you will likely have echo problems if you use FXS ports and lines from bell, unless you splurge on the full size card and get the echo canceller module. As for phones, my personal favourite is the Aastra 9112i. You can get these from Williams Telecom in Missisauga for around $175 or so (I'm guessing, based on their wholsale prices). These are excellent sounding phones, with the right feature set. They are really easy to remote provision with a TFTP server (important to set up, but really easy to do). Get the updated software from the Aastra web site and put it on the TFTP server. You have to rename the file to 9112i.st for it to work right. The 9133i is also a really nice phone, with more buttons, and BLFs (with the latest software). Also nice are the Polycomm phones, but these are a little harder to get, and have much more complicated configuration files. They have some neat features though. I get all my trunks through a little company called Unlimitel (Unlimitel.ca) They can connect to you via SIP or IAX2, whichever you prefer. The price is $2.00 per DID number, and 1.1c per minute. even if you are just fiddling around, this is a bargain. Their quality is excellent (I use them for all my gateway connectivity). If you are just messing around, hooking up to analog lines is fine, but the quality and features just don't cut it if you want to use it for anything commercial. You have to use either a T1 or borrow someone elses (Unlimitel). A great house system would be a 9112i in each major room, a 9133i in the Kitchen or office (wherever your traffic is), and if you want, some FXS ports on a PCI card for a garage phone, fax machine, cordless phone, etc. I have a red "no-dial" phone labelled crash net plugged in to an FXS port that dials all my friends when I pick it up. It's great when you are trying to organize a party on a Saturday night. Getting your service through Unlimitel (or a company like them) means that a) You get better quality for half the price b) You can have everyone in the house talking on the phone at the same time c) You can have different phone numbers in different cities, or for different members of your household. Let me know if you do end up working with the Aastra phones. There are some neat tricks that aren't well published, and I have some scripts that will generate config files for them. On February 27, 2006 13:10, Legends wrote: > Hi, Folks > > How are you. I want establish a small lab to run VoIP Asterisk in my home. > I need buy some hardware to support my phone. Any suggestion? One FXO, > FXS and Ethernet port is mandatory, right? > Information regarding price is also welcomed. Thanks. -- Tim St. Pierre IP telephony specialist sip://[EMAIL PROTECTED] 416 890 0849 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
