[olug] Asterisk and looking for SIP provider suggestions.

[Kenny Kant]

Jon,  I  can offer the following:

- SIP Providers / ITSP's for Asterisk:

         - QuantumVoice (http://www.quantumvoice.com) - I have used them 
on and off for the past 5 years.  I moved away from them at one point 
because they did not have very flexible pricing plans but this has 
changed so I came back to them.  They have a cool add-on feature for 
incoming fax-to-email which I like as well.  I understand they recently 
changed owners so there seems to be some transition going on but service 
on the whole has been reliable.  They also have setup instructions for 
Asterisk and/or will send you an ATA to use with their service.

     - AxVoice (http://www.axvoice.com) - I used these guys for about 
two years because they were recommended on the nerd vittles website.  I 
never had a problem with them and would recommend them as well.  I think 
they are out of New York and have changed some of their pricing plans to 
be more competitive now as well.


If you do not want to get a SIP provider you can always bring in a 
regular analog line into your Asterisk box but you will need to 
terminate it somehow.  Digium makes a number of smaller PCI cards you 
can install into your machine which will give you FXO ports.   I believe 
the smallest you can get now from Digium  is a 4 port 
(http://www.digium.com/en/products/analog/tdm410.php) but they used to 
make single port cards which you can still find around the Net: 
http://www.echostore.com/ax-100p.html.  Sangoma is another manufacturer 
I have heard good things about I would check them out too.   
Alternatively,  you can get an external ATA device that comes with FXO 
ports that you can hook to your network that will then feed your 
Asterisk box via SIP.  I believe Linksys, Sipura and others have these.  
When we still had Cox for home phone line we used an old Cisco MC3810 
Router with FXO Cards to terminate analog and send to our home Asterisk.

These would all be options for someone wanting to setup an Asterisk box 
from scratch.  The setup process is not very hard to do but making 
changes to a bare Asterisk system is not very menu driven ..etc If you 
are looking for something a little easier to maintain you can look at:

- Switchvox - which is a commercial version of Asterisk packaged with a 
great GUI.  You can purchase a switchvox appliance but this would 
probably be overkill cost wise for a home setup.  However you can still 
install the Switchvox package onto a machine and use it for home use.  
There is a limit on total number extensions ..etc but it is a great 
alternative.

AsteriskNOW - is another effort from Digium to take Asterisk and give it 
a GUI. I believe this is a full Linux distribution which has Asterisk + 
FreePBX packaged all into one.  This I think is free as well.


Thanks!

Kenny


On 11/23/2010 7:58 AM, Jon Larsen wrote:
> I'm looking to cancel my landline phone and park the phone number with a
> SIP provider and use asterisk to connect for the calls.  Does anyone have
> any suggested SIP providers?  Is that what I want?  Are there
> alternatives?  Has anyone else done this, and if so, how detailed was the
> setup with an asterisk box?  Can you recommend a small, embedded asterisk
> device for home use?
>
> Jon L.
>