tmbrown97
Senior Member
Let me start by saying - I hate phones.... I don't want to be on them except when I need to. What's worse? I *really* hate cell phones! Not the technology or even the idea of being reachable - more the fact that quality seems to be getting worse over the years, not better. Home phone lines are clearer, but honestly - paying $35+/month for a phone I average under 60 minutes on per month? Not for me.
What's worse is I'm used to business phone systems - having them, installing them, maintaining them - and recently even going 100% cisco voip. Now that's spoiled - a single phone number can ring 30 places; or can be routed around to others; people can dial special codes to get routed to your cell phone, etc. Need a fax? No biggie - grab number off the DID pool and add an analog adapter - there's no impact to the bil other than the few minutes the line is in use.
Well - in my home office, I've decided it's time to finally do something similar. I've been watching Asterisk for some time, but didn't want to have another computer running 24/7 - especially as we're about to enter the summer months which tend to come with $700/month electric bills. The other day, I came across this site: www.plugpbx.org - it's an installation of Asterisk with FreePBX running on those cool little wall-wart computers (the SheevaPlug). I finally decided to dive in.
To start with, I ordered the sheevaplug and a Linksys SPA3102 so I can tie in my existing line and get an analog port out for the cordless phones. The last parts came in today.
In about an hour I had FreePBX running - though nowhere near 100% - I still need to add sip phones, tie my sip provider back in, etc... but thanks to Dan's suggestion I play with a VM while I was waiting for parts, I already did this using an AsteriskNOW VM the other day, so this is all pretty familiar (I've only been doing this for 3 days total and I had a softphone making outbound sip calls to my cell phone 2 days ago).
The best part? Cost. I chose the pay-per-minute model - it gives you more flexibility and I'll hardly use minutes anyways. I signed up with voip.ms - got a good local phone number - and it'll support (out of the box) up to 25 incoming channels and 5 outbound channels - and all I pay is the $0.99/month for each phone number I want and $.0125/minute usage. I have my own voicemail and outlook integration with voicemail; or can redirect voicemail to google-voice; I can add a fax line for $.99/month - and I only pay for my actual usage. In most cases it'll be under $4/month.
If you're interested, check it out! Either way - with the Sheevaplug or AsteriskNOW it's easy enough to get up in running. I don't know linux at all and with creative googling I'm getting through it just fine.
Now all that's left is buying a couple of really nice high end SIP phones - I'm thinking some of the aastra ones that'll compare to the executive phones from work.
What's worse is I'm used to business phone systems - having them, installing them, maintaining them - and recently even going 100% cisco voip. Now that's spoiled - a single phone number can ring 30 places; or can be routed around to others; people can dial special codes to get routed to your cell phone, etc. Need a fax? No biggie - grab number off the DID pool and add an analog adapter - there's no impact to the bil other than the few minutes the line is in use.
Well - in my home office, I've decided it's time to finally do something similar. I've been watching Asterisk for some time, but didn't want to have another computer running 24/7 - especially as we're about to enter the summer months which tend to come with $700/month electric bills. The other day, I came across this site: www.plugpbx.org - it's an installation of Asterisk with FreePBX running on those cool little wall-wart computers (the SheevaPlug). I finally decided to dive in.
To start with, I ordered the sheevaplug and a Linksys SPA3102 so I can tie in my existing line and get an analog port out for the cordless phones. The last parts came in today.
In about an hour I had FreePBX running - though nowhere near 100% - I still need to add sip phones, tie my sip provider back in, etc... but thanks to Dan's suggestion I play with a VM while I was waiting for parts, I already did this using an AsteriskNOW VM the other day, so this is all pretty familiar (I've only been doing this for 3 days total and I had a softphone making outbound sip calls to my cell phone 2 days ago).
The best part? Cost. I chose the pay-per-minute model - it gives you more flexibility and I'll hardly use minutes anyways. I signed up with voip.ms - got a good local phone number - and it'll support (out of the box) up to 25 incoming channels and 5 outbound channels - and all I pay is the $0.99/month for each phone number I want and $.0125/minute usage. I have my own voicemail and outlook integration with voicemail; or can redirect voicemail to google-voice; I can add a fax line for $.99/month - and I only pay for my actual usage. In most cases it'll be under $4/month.
If you're interested, check it out! Either way - with the Sheevaplug or AsteriskNOW it's easy enough to get up in running. I don't know linux at all and with creative googling I'm getting through it just fine.
Now all that's left is buying a couple of really nice high end SIP phones - I'm thinking some of the aastra ones that'll compare to the executive phones from work.