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On Fri, 9 Jan 2009, Steph Foster wrote:
My curiousity re Asterisk has been piqued by some recent discussion on the list and elsewhere. I have a few noobish questions that perhaps some one can enlighten me with. I hear that in order to interface Asterisk to POTS you need some kind of card ?
There are varius ways to do it. There are analogue adapters (ATA) that connect to the incoming phone line, as well as PCI cards for your PC.
What sort of cards are they and what sort of starting price bracket are we looking at ?
Henry has posted some links & check the archives, but briefly for about £60 you can get a sinel port card.
What is needed to allow your Asterisk box to accept incoming VoIP calls ?
An account with an ITSP - Internet Telephony Service Provider. There are many... Sipgate are popular, Gradwell good, but aimed at the serious home user or small business, and most of the hardware vendows have their own services too. My service is aimed at businesses rather than home users, although in a month or so, I'm considering offering a sipgate-like service, but it's a lot of work on the suport side!
If you have time, and the inclanation, then it's possible to get totally free calls via VoIP to regular PSTN numbers in the UK and Europe. Lookup Betamax resellers - eg. voipcheap, smslisto, and many others.
Can I simply hook an Asterisk box to the net or do i need the service of a third party provider.
You can "hook it to the net", but you then need someone else to talk to, or a service to plumb into the PSTN to make calls to regular landlines, etc.
I've had a look at the Asterisk website but its kinda going over my head like a jet at 30000 feet.
Google for "Asterisk, tbhe future of telephony" - it's an O'Reilly book which has recently been released for free in PDF format.
Gordon
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