Originally Posted by xyzzy
I suppose we could get away with 3 as I'm planning on dropping one PSTN line and we recently got a Sunrocket VOIP line. TO tell the truth, I'm less than happy with the performance of the VOIP line. I'm not sure whether it's because it generally sucks or because I have it connected behind my router. Calls tend to drop and I can't manage to receive calls on it. I've been traveling too much of late to be able to take the time to debug any of this.
I hear concerns about routers often, but really that shouldn't matter if you've forwarded what ever ports they require. Could it be a bandwidth or traffic shaping (from your ISP) issue?
Originally Posted by xyzzy
How do the external FXO options work? Are they as I suspect, single port per box things? I really want to stay away from wall warts and the like. What exactly do I need to connect the Sunrocket gizmo to my Asterisk box?
Oh -- I see lots of references to the SPA-942 being easily configurable to 4 lines with a firmware update. I also see places selling the update for $35. Do I need to budget $35 for each phone for the update or can I buy it once (or even download it from somewhere)? I probably do want to see the status of each line on each phone so I'd need more than two lines/phone...
Have I asked enough questions?
Regarding the external FXO options- frankly I've never used one so I cannot give you a lot of insight there. I think Supura made (or makes) a 2 port option, but not sure about more than 2.
As for the sunrocket thing, you treat it just like a PSTN line. In other words, you come out of their FXS and into your FXO. You might call them and see if they support using your own device- IE trixbox. Ask if they support SIP trunks.
As for the SPA-942, I do have one but only the 2 line firmware. I really dont know about the feasibility of using the firmware more than once. However, if you buy it and want to send me a copy I'll test it
One note about lines: depending on what you want to do exactly remember that Asterisk doesnt really need a multiline phone to use multi lines... For instance, on my one line phones I just dial *8 then the number go out over my work line or *5 goes out over my NuFone account...straight dialing (no prefix) goes out over the home Broadvoice account. Similarly you can transfer, conference, etc all through feature codes. Incoming lines work the same way. You can prefix the caller IDs...so when a work call comes in it starts with McK: followed by the real caller ID. When it rings phones that are not set-up with office lines, you can just look at the caller ID and tell who it is.
I guess what I'm saying is, typically people don't get phones that support the number of "call instances" for each incoming or outgoing "trunk" they have.