[geeks] Voip options

[Cody Swanson]

What I did at home was run a simple asterisk instance on my freebsd atom 
server. I use link2voip for my SIP trunking, they charge something like 
1.5 cents a minute for north american calls and their overseas rates are 
also very cheap (france was 2.5cents/min last time I called). My DID 
costs me $2.50 a month. They also let you set your own CID with 
asterisk, mine is currently "Who Dis?" although you could choose 
something a little more professional. :-)

For my home I'm using a simple Cisco SPA-2102 2 line analog telephone 
adapter (cheap on ebay) in my basement wired into my household telephone 
panel. For handsets we use regular analog cordless phones and I have a 
polycom 403 IP handset in my office. It's worked out to be very cheap, 
costing around $60-80/year for the amount of calling we do and it's been 
quite reliable.

On 7/20/2011 1:14 AM, Dan Duncan wrote:
> I used Vonage for some time and went to a similar service from my cellphone
> provider but I will soon be changing providers and will lose the option so
> I'm looking for advice.  I don't know that I want to go into the VOIP
> business, hardware-wise, but I am looking for options.  Has anyone used
> Magic Jack and is it possible to seriously lock it down by running on a thin
> client or a VM?  (The thought of a windoze pc on my network makes me
> shudder.)
>
> My typical usage is hundreds of minutes a month on conference calls (mostly
> toll free numbers) and occasional spikes of long distance numbers (mostly on
> call pages and calls to field engineers, but also family) and I already have
> analog phones throughout the house so I'd like something that accomodates
> that.  If not, I guess I can go back to vonage.  Is skype practical for that
> sort of usage?
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