VoIP software

[Kenneth E. Lussier]

On Wed, 2004-11-17 at 19:17 -0500, Bill McGonigle wrote:
> On Nov 17, 2004, at 12:11, Kenneth E. Lussier wrote:
> 
> > You need
> > an FXO card of some sort to plug your phone line into. You can buy a
> > single port FXO card from  Digium  (Wildcard X100P) for $100...
> > Then, you need IP phones. You can get Grandstream Budgetones for about
> > $65, or you can spend $600 on a Cisco :-)
> 
> Is there a card you can use to plug your existing phone 'network' into? 
>   At this point I just want Asterisk for doing voicemail and 
> auto-attendant, so no need for VOIP phones, per se, just two POTS lines 
> in the house.

Yes, you need an FXS card. You can get the TDM400P from Digium 
(http://www.digium.com/index.php?menu=wildcard_tdm400p2). It is a 4-port
card that can have either FXS or FXO modules on it. I know several
people that have the tdm400p with 3 FXS modules and one FXO module. That
allows them to connect the card to the PSTN as well as their existing
phones. 

Another idea that I have seen used in a few places is that rather than
use FXS modules, you can get an IAD that turns your regular analog phone
into an IP phone. You can get a Cisco ATA-186 for about $120 (or other
various brands for a lot less. Search froogle for IAD). Rather then
plugging just one phone into it, you can plug in the base system of an
expandable phone system (i.e. one base, 5 handsets). Since all of the
handsets communicate back to the base, the base is the only one that
needs to be IP. 

HTH,
Kenny

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