[lug] VOIP setup advice

[Daniel Webb]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 12:00:24AM -0700, Nate Duehr wrote:

> First off, why Asterisk?  Are there advanced features in it where you 
> need/want to run your own PBX?  Do you need extensions and support for 
> multiple SIP phones?
> 
> To simply extend one building's analog phone line to another over IP, 
> there are ATA's out there that will do FXO on one end and FXS on the 
> other that you can poke their IP addresses into them via touch-tones 
> (DTMF) from a connected phone.  KISS principal applies here if you have 
> anyone in your building who can barely dial a phone.  Make it work 
> reliably first, then add features.  :-)

(responding to the simple ATA pairs)
Well, I don't know about such things.  What brand and models can do
this, and where can I read about it?

My idea is to get rid of my phone lines completely.  My wife has a cell
phone anyway as a backup.  So I would not have a regular phone line at
either place to run across an ATA pair.  Besides, for that scheme to
give me two phone lines, it still means buying two phone lines from
Qwest.

I thought of Asterisk because it seems to be one way to set up multiple
phone lines without the phone company.  The other way is to use a
service such as Vonage or Voicepulse, which was my other option I
mentioned in the original email.  The downside of these is that they
cost a lot of money for two unlimited plans (Vonage is $60 for two lines
as far as I can tell), and they want to lock you in to their service and
hardware.

> >and using livevoip.com with two DIDs for $14 + 1.2 cents a minute (still
> >unsure if the per-minute rate is for outgoing calls or incoming and
> >outgoing).  
> 
> Why pay a per-minute rate at all... plenty of VoIP providers doing 
> flat-rate service these days.  Hunt around a bit.

All the ones I have seen are $30-$35 per line, and they want to lock you
in to their hardware.  You would have to talk over 2 hours a day to
exceed that cost with livevoip.  The cheaper plans seem to be one year
committments, and there's no way in hell I'm doing that without knowing
the quality.  Our AT&T/Cingular cell phone service comes to mind when
considering how bad a 1-year contract is...

> One thing to consider... if the "head-end" of your network is typical 
> SOHO routers and such, voice quality may be a problem when the overall 
> outbound/inbound pipe is fully loaded.  Linksys (and others) make SOHO 
> routers that do QoS now that can help with that, giving your ATA or 
> whatever you use priority over other data traffic.

I have read that this can make a huge difference, so I'm budgeting for
the cost of a new router.
 
> You can get FXO/FXS cards for Asterisk for about $9 these days.  

What search terms should I use, or what brands and models can I find
this cheap?  One of the reasons I was looking at the FXS I mentioned was
that it doesn't require a computer.  The second residence will only have
laptops, so no cheap PCI FXS cards.  Are there also super-cheap PCMCIA
FXS cards?  I have been looking, but haven't seen anything like this.
Also, I'm wary of anything that requires drivers in the Linux audio
realm, from large amounts of painful experience.

> Getting a phone line (either from a provider or from the first
> building) to the second building is a piece of cake -- the devil is in
> the details of exactly what features you want when you get done.  Free
> international calling to 25 countries?  Support for SIP phones,
> including softphones on your PC?  Conferencing?  Voicemail for
> multiple people via menu?  Via DID's?  Integrated with e-mail?
> Music-on-hold?  "Follow-me" call routing that will ring all of your
> phones?  Access to community networks like Free World Dialup?

We want to use all our old phone equipment, meaning cordless phones.  We
don't want to buy expensive SIP phones, and softphones are silly when
plain old phones work just fine.  We would like voicemail for multiple
people, and the screen-on-caller-id feature I mentioned before.  I would
like something that can grow as I decide I want new features.  Is
Asterisk that intense to set up, in comparison to Apache, Exim, Bind,
Vim, Mutt, MySQL, etc?  If so, I should rethink the Asterisk idea and
stick to something like Voicepulse.

Thanks for all the feedback.