[Asterisk-Users] pre-newbie - some basic questions...

[d.redmore at att.net]

Hello All,

Been completely obsessed for the last two days with VoIP and Asterisk - running on 2 hours sleep and coffee - sorry if this is a little scattered... 

Okay,  I've got a small start-up company that installs traditional PBX (Nortel mainly) systems, data network infrastructure, commercial audio/video, residential audio/video/voice/data and we do lighting control systems...

I've got two home offices about 30 miles apart - running some basic lan services over a CIPE link between here and there...  this all started because I'd like to find a way to integrate the phone lines/system better...  

What really has me intriqued at the moment is the idea of using a VoIP service provider to make and recieve calls with an (800) for customers to call in on...  iconnecthere.com seems to be telling me that I can do this for only $20-$25/month with no contract...  Is this true/possible or am I missing something?  What about nufone.net - any one have experience woth their rates and service?  I'm envisioning a system in which * could handle incoming/outgoing calls to the service provider - and we could have an IP phone (maybe the Grandstream 100's for $130 a pair?) in each office and be able to answer incoming calls from either location - transfer calls between offices - access voicemail - etc...  this sound familiar to anyone - any experience with this type of scenerio?

inet here is a SDSL link @ 1.5megs - other office has Cable modem...  I think with the encryption overhead I can only get about 14kb/sec when pulling a webpage over the VPn from an APACHE server in the other office...  will I have enough bandwidth to handle calls?  

Thanks so much for any insights...  with a new business, a 3 year-old, a 1 year old and a very pregnant wife - I don't have a lot of time to experiment with new ideas :)  So I'm trying to really get a hadle on everything before I decide to invest a lot of time trying to make this work...


thanks again...

dave redmore