An ATA lets u use existing telephones, if you have some that you
currently like.
For a single line in house something like the sipura 3000 is simple and
small and easy
Ken
Peter Hardy wrote:
Sonia Hamilton wrote:
What are people's recommendations for an ip phone for experimenting with
Asterisk? The book I'm reading (OReilly's "Switching to VoIP") talks
about a "Grandstream Budgetone" - what's an Australian equivalent?
What about a recommended PCI card so Asterisk can communicate with the
POTS? The book mentions "Digium X100P".
I know I don't need both; I want to experiment. I attended the SLUG talk
on VoIP - back then a lot of it didn't make sense so I didn't take
notes :-)
You've got a few options here.
- A softphone. Runs on your PC, uses SIP to talk to Asterisk. ekiga and
linphone are great for this.
- An analogue telephony adaptor (ATA). A little box you plug in to your
LAN and lets you connect a regular analogue handset to your voip system.
Again, uses SIP to talk to Asterisk. I use a Sipura SP2000 with a cheap
cordless phone at home, and it works great.
- A Digium PCI card. The X100P you mentioned only seems to have an FXO
port, but you can get models with both FXO and FXS ports - they'll let
you connect to the POTS network as well as plug in one or two analogue
handsets.
- An IP telephone. Again, most use the SIP protocol, but there's one or
two that are starting to come out that understand IAX. I'll agree with
others and say the Grandstreams are a bit dinky. But I don't have any
recommendations about *good* IP handsets. :-)
If you're just experimenting, I'd say stick to a softphone until you get
everything sorted out. After that, well, there's not too much difference
in price between an ATA and an IP handset, and the feature set is much
the same unless you throw buckets of money at an IP phone (my knowledge
here is a good six months out of date, though, so things might be
different).
Finally, O'Reilly's "Asterisk: The Future of Telephony" is an awesome
book on how to drive asterisk, and it's under a creative commons licence
- narf a copy from
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk:+The+Future+of+Telephony
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
