[Wylug-discuss] Linux-friendly POTS-to-VOIP-to-POTS

[Dave Fisher]

On Wed, Oct 12, 2005 at 02:08:09PM +0000, James Holden wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 11:57 +0100, Dave Fisher wrote:
> > Hi All,
> > 
> > My landline phone is dying (handset battery recharges rarely last for
> > more than a few minutes) and I need to replace it fairly soon.
> 
> You can get spare batteries, of course :-)

You'd have thought  ... but easier said than done with the 'customised'
battery in question.

> Easynet have LLU's some of the leeds exchanges. 

I'll take a look.

> Bulldog is available
> too, but I've heard too many horror stories.

Me too.  I'll be staying clear of them, at least until things have
settled down a bit.

> There are many VoIP enabled ADSL modems these days too, such as the
> Speedtouch 716, which is ADSL + Router + 4xLAN + 2xVoIP + 802.11g. You
> configure it with the SIP proxy details of the VoIP provider and then
> connect your regular house phones up to it along with the Ethernet
> cabling for the broadband.

It's probably a stupid question, but what does a VOIP router get you,
that an ordinary router and a web-configurable IP phone don't?

> There's nothing wrong with using Asterisk if you want to do a bit more
> clever stuff such as multiple voicemail boxes, faxback etc...

 ... mmm .. that stuff would be useful, but what about the
setup/configuration time?  Have you any direct experience?

Dave