Teach me about voip.
What does it take to operate? Tell all: hardware, software, phone service/internet access, ongoing mx or tweaking.
I have 3 lines.
1 voice only, customer line with after-hours answering machine.
2 voice and dsl; private line
3 fax/credit card line used as a backup voice if the others are in use.
4 house line runs to business too as a 1/4mi extension
The first two feed a Norstar Meridian system with about 8 desktop phones.
Current ATT bills 200/mo biz, 100/mo house.
Wow.
OK, Asterisk system. You can buy a pre-packaged server with Asterisk Now! or Trixbox or something, or do it yourself with your own hardware and free software. Asterisk is free, and there is a web GUI or two although I haven't found any that are useful.
The learning curve takes a bit. There seems to be one book, and it's good for learning about how VOIP and Asterisk work but is way out of date for Asterisk itself. You can pay for training. You can also pay someone to set it all up the way you want it.
Ongoing maintenance... I almost never touch mine. Only to make changes. It runs on a server (under $200 worth of hardware) that does other things too, so I do OS updates and that's about it. Uptime is not as good as a wired POTS line, but it's above 99.9% now. I have not had an unscheduled outage in over half a year, since I fixed a persistent problem that was the result of one of my mistakes in a config file.
I also have a remote hosted virtual server at Linode. It's a web server for all my stuff, and also runs Asterisk. The two talk to each other, so if the one at my house croaks the remote one will get the incoming calls and pass them along. The only time I'm completely off line is if my home cable modem connection goes down (which is extremely rare any more). In that case the callers will get voicemail when the get connected to the remote server, and I get an email with the voice message attached as a WAV file. It's pretty slick.
Inbound FAX calls are automagically detected, FAX received, converted to PDF and emailed to me. I can send an outbound FAX via email from anywhere on my own network... I just send it to <phonenumber>@FAX. I run my own local mail server, which is what makes that part possible.
For phones, I'd say pick up some gently used Cisco IP phones on eBay. I use 7960s at home, but 7940s would have been enough. If you want cordless, there are a couple of options (none perfect). There are tons of very nice IP phones out there. Many of them have extra ports so you can use a single Ethernet connection for the phone and a computer. If you want to connect analog phones, FAX machines, etc you can get a clone TDM400 card pretty cheaply. It will also let you connect any POTS lines you have to the system, so you can keep your existing lines until you're ready to get rid of them.
As for features... try and find something Asterisk WON'T do. Call park and pickup, conference bridge, voicemail, FAX, automated attendant, call screening, ring groups of phones, ring one phone if another doesn't answer, call forward, the list goes on and on and on. Heck, I recently started using IMAP voicemail storage... that means when a voicemail is received, the message is stored in a mail folder. If I listen to or delete the message from my email program, the message indicator on the phone goes out. Slick.
My VOIP lines are DIRT cheap. Flowroute.com. Even a toll free number is ridiculously cheap. I have one POTS line left, our home number. I'll probably port that number to Flowroute later this year and get rid of the wire line, which should save me about another $30 a month or so.
Now, the gotchas. First -- you'll need to learn a lot if you plan to set it all up yourself. If you like to tinker, you'll LOVE Asterisk and VOIP. If you don't, well, you'll either hire someone to do it or you'll probably hate it. Mitigating this gotcha is the fact that you can do your learning on cheap hardware without breaking anything, and start rolling it out once yo know what you're doing. The initial investment CAN be pretty low.
Second... Internet access. Your phone service will only be as reliable as your Internet connection. Each VOIP call needs about 128K of bandwidth. You'll probably want to upgrade your cable modem service to the fastest you can get. If you're on DSL... good luck.
