Internetworkers: http://www.ibiblio.org/internetworkers/

[Jason Tower <jason AT cerient.net>]

it's easy, your voip phones connect to the existing ethernet network and use 
SIP to talk to the * server.  it doesn't happen by magic (you gotta 
configure things) but it's pretty straightforward.  the more difficult part 
is establishing a connection to the pstn.  you can either connect directly 
(which requires phone lines and special cards like those made by diguim) or 
use a service like voicepulse which gives you an IAX trunk between your * 
server and theirs.

i use the voicepulse setup for my business, it works great.  for eleven 
bucks a month i get a 919 phone number with unlimited incoming calls and 
$0.01/min for outgoing calls.  our * server is on one of our colo boxes, and 
we have several SIP phones (polycom 501) that we can plug in anywhere in the 
world for a live extension.  naturally * gives us voicemail w/ email 
forwarding and all the usual pbx features.  fan-smegging-tastic.

another option is to use a hosted service to handle the server duties, then 
all you need are phones and a net connection.  featuretel are the local boys 
to contact for such a setup, tell them jason sent you :)

the critical part is that you *MUST* have a good QoS system in place on your 
wan connection to ensure that voip traffic gets priority over other traffic. 
 we use openbsd to do this and it works very well.

jason

Tony Spencer wrote:
> I have several friends that run small businesses and rave about Asterix.
> http://www.asterisk.org/
>
> Does anyone here have experience with it?  I need to handle about 15
> extensions and I'd like to hook it up with VOIP and a land line for backup.
> The one thing I'm confused on is how the phones hookup to it.  Do you just
> plug the IP phone directly into the network and then Asterix is just aware
> of them?
>
>
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