[asterisk-users] Looking for ideas for nice **Asterisk** home phone system

[Dave Platt]

> Great discussion, all of it.  Thanks, people.
> 
> How much power does the home asterisk box need ?
> 
> I'm using Asus Eee Box (1012Ps) as Myth front ends in another project.
> About $280 with 320 Gb hard drive and 2 GB RAM.  Atom 510 processor.  Built
> in Wifi.  Nearly silent.  Runs F15 nicely.  Would one of them suffice ?

I'm running my small home Asterisk system on an Itox motherboard
with an Atom N270, at 1.6 GHz.  No CPU-related problems noted.
In fact, I'd run it fairly successfully on a Pentium Pro 200,
and it worked well enough for simple uses (e.g. no fancy
codecs or transcoding).

> It looks like I am going to need an ATA for the fax machines.  Two.  My wife
> informed me yesterday she wants her own in her office.  VOIP handles fax
> machines, right ?

This could very well be the most problematic (heart-breaking, frustrating)
part of your whole intended installation.

Fax -> modem -> very sensitive to jitter and dropouts.  Making fax
work over VoIP (using A-law or u-law) is often feasible within a
LAN environment, because the jitter and packet-loss rates are low.
Making fax work decently on VoIP over the Internet is much harder...
jitter and packet-loss rates which would be slightly annoying for
a voice conversation can seriously disrupt or abort a fax call.

Some (relatively few) VoIP providers support a specialized mode
called T.38. in which their "far end" equipment intervenes in the
fax protocol in order to "smooth out" the process of making fax
work over a lossy/jittery/high-latency VoIP connection.  This isn't
common and seems to be hard to count on.

I suspect you'll be better off either:

(1) maintaining one analog land-line, and using it for fax
    (and perhaps backup for VoIP), and/or

(2) subscribing to a commercial "fax to email" gateway service,
    in which people send their faxes to a number owned by the
    service provider, and the resulting fax is converted to a
    compressed PDF and then emailed to you.  I imagine that
    some of these providers also have an "email to fax"
    service, operating in the reverse direction... you email
    a PDF or other file to an address alias they provide, and
    it's faxed out for you.

You *can* operate a sort of hybrid system in your house, if
that's convenient to you... e.g. a SIP ATA for your fax
machine, to Asterisk, to an analog land-line (via either a
dedicated PCI bus card, or an outbound port on a channel bank
or certain ATA devices).  The jitter and delay on the home
LAN would be low enough that this should work reliably.
You could also run a combination of hylafax, and iaxmodem
on the Asterisk system, and thus use the Asterisk server as
a fax-to-email / email-to-fax / document-to-fax gateway.

> I'm wondering what phones everyone is using.   Should I stick with analog
> wireless handsets or are there some good SIP wireless phones out there that
> I don't know about ???

Several companies make DECT SIP phones and systems... typically I
think they'll handle 4 to 6 DECT handsets, and a couple of independent
SIP calls at any given moment.  These may or may not be less expensive
than buying some one- or two-analog-line SIP systems, and some
ATAs;  they'd definitely involve less equipment and wiring.