Originally Posted by SpaceBass
Ohhh you are going big! Very cool!
For the VoIP phones, I REALLY like the cisco stuff, of course that comes with a price tag. The Linksys phones are basically sipura firmware inside a Cisco shell...and they are amazing. I believe some of them offer a switch built in...at least mine have a 'knock-out' on the back for the port.
My only recomendation for a card would have been the TDM400 from digium, but like you have seen, its expensive. They used to offer a hobbiest/home version that was exactly the same, only a fraction of the cost. Not sure if they still do...
Another option is to use an external adapter. Sipura makes both FXO and FXS...
I get the two backwards all the time... but an FXO is what you use to connecting an incoming PSTN line (a traditional phone line) and and FXS is what allows you connect a traditional phone. Either way Sipura, and now Linksys makes devices with combos of both. You can get a PAP2 which is a 2 port FXS for less than $100 on Ebay...or even for like $40 for the vonage version and re-flash it with the unlocked firmware (if you can find it
)
They also made multiport FXO's as wells as combo devices with FXS and FXO ports...mostly under the sipura label.
Hope that helps!
Another thing you can do which is variably expensive and requires some additional technical knowledge is to acquire an End of Sale Cisco router which has DSPs (possibly a 1700 or certain 2600s) off eBay as well as VIC-2FXS cards and if necessary an NM-2V and you can then have a trunk to the router and plug the phones in.
Personally I'm probably going to take the CallManager/Unity route with Exchange 2007 if I get the time to do this at home, but, that's just what integrates with job skills I want to acquire.
I've heard some pretty good stuff about FreeSwitch - freeswitch.org recently as well.