[TriLUG] Digital phone recomendations

[Tanner Lovelace]

On 1/20/06, Barry Gaskins <barry.gaskins at gmail.com> wrote:
>    The time warner digital phone service is $39  per month for unlimited
> calls but that does not seem to be the best deal.  Vonage has a $25 per
> month plan for unlimited calls that we are considering.  But the box they

Unless you use your phone a lot, I'd suggest going with Vonage's
$15/month for 500 minutes.  Extra minutes are just $0.03/minute
which means you'd need to use more than 833 minutes/month to
justify the extra $10/month.

> show has 2 phone jacks on it.  I can't figure out if I can just run a phone
> cord from one of those jacks into a phone plug in my wall to make all  of my
> current phones work or would I be limited to plugging 2 phones into the 2
> jacks on the box I would get from vonage.  Since I have a wife and 3 kids

Yes, you can plug it into your phone system.  That's exactly what I have done.
Note, however, that my phone cords all come to a central distribution point
and I feed it from there.  If your phone system is one wire run to all the
individual phone jacks, I would guess you could just plug it into one and
do that.  I'd DEFINITELY, however, make sure that the phone lines were
disconnected from the outside phone company lines first.

> and  8 phones in the house that does not sound very appealing.
>
>    I would ultimately like to get a card to put into a computer and have a
> linux box running asterisk that can do all the cool stuff that would enable

Note that while Vonage uses SIP under the covers, it is a completely
closed system.  If you want to connect it to Asterisk, you'll have to
do it with an analog connection (i.e. run the line out of the vonage
box that would go to your telephone into the analog->digital card
in an asterisk box and then do the opposite to get Asterisk talking
to your telephone lines.  If future Asterisk interoperability is a
big concern, you're probably better off looking at a different VoIP
vendor.  However, be aware that none of them are quite as
"idiot proof" as Vonage is.

> but my wife is tired of waiting for me to figure out all the stuff that
> would require and I don't have any time for that right now.  I plan to do
> that at some point but I am thinking about doing vonage or something just to
> try it out for now.
>
>    So does anybody have any suggestions on what company to use or warnings
> about what to avoid? Does anybody have their digital phone plugged into the
> house phone wiring to make all the regular phones in your house work?

Digital phones and analog phones use completely different signalling
and can *not* be plugged into the same network without killing one of
the phones (most likely the digital one).  Just don't go there.

Good luck with everything.  I'm sure there are many other knowledgeable
people on the list who can point out all the mistakes I've made :-) and just
how I'm wrong and you can get Asterisk working with Vonage. :-)

Cheers,
Tanner

--
Tanner Lovelace
clubjuggler at gmail dot com
http://wtl.wayfarer.org/
(fieldless) In fess two roundels in pale, a billet fesswise and an
increscent, all sable.