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www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/Asterisk+hardware

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Posted by crouse

www.voiplink.com/IP_PBX_Asterisk_Hardware_s/64.htm

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Posted by crouse

FXS and FXO cards with Zapata Driver.

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Posted by jackson

The existing phone service in many homes is analog Plain Old Telephone Service POTS for incoming lines from the phone company, also known as the Public Switched Telephone Network connected to regular analog phones. (Note: In the US ISDN, digital phone lines, never really took off the way in did in some parts of europe and Asia.) This page covers analog phones and phone lines only, in particularly the low end devices that are most appropriate for home use.

Asterisk can be used in all digital configurations using Voice over IP VoIP connections to software phones running on PC and to phone service providers that you can connect to over the internet. There are a lot of tutorials explaining how to do that. Those can be quite helpful for learning and getting started. However, once you want to start using Asterisk "for real", you'll probably want to integrate asterisk with your existing home phones and phone lines. I found a lot of the information was scattered in different places, so this page is an attempt to help people get started and help make an informed decision on what hardware to get.

While there is an ever growing set of choices for digitial VoIP phones, there is a much larger selection of plain analog phones available practically everywhere at very low price points. In terms of the economies of scale, look at how much smaller the choices are for 2 line phones. The handful of phones that are available with more than 2 lines that I've seen can cost about as much as your whole Asterisk installation. The majority of the available VoIP/SIP phones are hardwired. I believe the most desirable phones for home are cordless. Things are improving however, two of the largest consumer cordless phone producers, Uniden and VTech have announced cordless VoIP phones. Hybrid mobile phones that can do VoIP over WiFi when it's available and fall back to a cellular network (GSM, CDMA) look very promising, but it's still pretty early. I believe most high tech households that would be considering installing Asterisk probably already have a reasonable investment in the better cordless phones. If your home needs a lot of phones, implementing Asterisk could allow you to save quite a bit of money allowing you to buy fairly simple low end phones.

If you are reading this, you probably already know this but there are many reasons for introducing the Asterisk PBX into your existing home phone setup such as:

* Sophisticated Voice Mail system to replace that aging answering machine. This can provide a mail box per person, that can be deliver notification by e-mail. Web based access to your voice mail is also available.
* Interactive Voice Response IVR systems - You can present callers with a menu, which can be particularly useful if you have more people in the house than you have incoming phone lines. "Press 1 for Him, Press 2 for Her, Press 3 for Kid No. 1, Press 4 for Kid No. 2"...
* Control over which phones ring at what times.
* Intercom (Place in house calls)
* Routing incoming calls by Caller ID.
* Need more than 2 incoming lines (Phones that handle more than two lines are much more expensive than 1 or 2 line phones, and there isn't very much selection available.)
* Call Detail Reports (for attempting to gain some control over costs, and/or teenagers)

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Posted by sagitraz