[A*UG] Advice

[Lindsay Haisley]

Thus spake Wayne Walker on Tue, Oct 18, 2005 at 09:58:24PM CDT
> On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 10:59:39AM -0500, Willie McKemie wrote:
> > All this Asterisk talk has piqued my interest!
> > 
> > At my home/business, I have a needed for two or more intercom stations. 
> > The station sites are ~2000' apart, but are on my LAN.  I used to use 
> > some unusual telephones that gave intercom service when two telephone 
> > lines were attached.  At one time, I had 6 or 8 of those telephones; 
> > they have all died and seem to be not replaceable.  Especially if I can 
> > get voip working on my satellite (net2dish/dirceway) broadband, I would 
> > like to drop one of my phone lines.  Or both.  Alas, my experiments 
> > with Skype indicate that the latency is insufferable.
> > 
> > So, here are my questions:
> > 1) Can Asterisk give me intercom service over my LAN.  I'm almost sure 
> > the answer to that is "yes"; if so, what hardware do I need?
> Intercom?  not exactly.  Phones, yes. You would need either a VoIP phone
> ($60 to $200 each) or an ATA (ethernet plug on one side and an RJ-11
> phone jack on the other side) ($80-$200 each) at each location.

When you think of Asterisk, think of PBX - like a traditional POTS
telephone PBX, but completely programmable.  Depending on how much you want
to invest in hardware, you can feed as many POTS lines to the world (FXS) or
phones (FXO) as you can afford the hardware to support.  You can also access
VoIP services on the Internet from Asterisk-friendly VoIP providers, kind of
like a "digital FXS" line - sort of.  I don't expect that Asterisk would be
necessary for digital intercom over a LAN.  This sounds more like the domain
of some other VoIP software, kind of like audio IM.

"To listen to a duck, press 9 now"

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