Howdy,
I'm ready to take the plunge and switch the house from POTS to VOIP. After searching the wiki and forums I still have a couple of questions. Any pointers, advice, opinions would be appreciated.
First the house is partially wired for 1GB ethernet and has partial wireless coverage, but three rooms don't have either. I'm not adverse to running more ethernet wire. I currently have 5 phones (2 phones have 2 wireless headsets for a total of 7 headsets). Where my core/hybrid is, I currently do not have a POTS drop.
The three wiring scenarios I see are:
1) What I think would be easiest, if it's doable, would be to disconnect the POTS from the external phone line, then put a ATA (IAXy S101I?) where I have both a LAN drop and a POTS drop. That would allow the existing phones to continue to be used as is. Then over time I could migrate to VOIP phones.
2) The next scenario is the same as #1 except would use an ATA/PCI adaptor and require adding a POTS drop near the core/hybrid.
3) The last scenario would be replacing the POTS drops with ethernet drops, then either switching to VOIP phones or ATA adaptors at each drop.
What I'd really like to know is if one or more of the above scenarios is a NO-GO before I try.
My next area of confusion is in looking at VOIP services. If I understand correctly, all I really need is a bare bones service that provides a sip id/gateway and a phone number (and a low cost
). All of the frills like call waiting/forwarding/... will be handled locally in the LinuxMCE core/hybrid.
Is there a larger list of known compatible VOIP services than what is listed at:
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/VOIP_Service_Providers? Any recommendations for Texas?
Thank you,
Roy
