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I am looking for something that can make and receive calls to and from landlines with incoming call notification.

You'll have problems tunneling thru the marketing, which in the telecom industry is slathered on very thickly with a spatula, kind of like paint on a Chinese made machine tool. A WIFI phone? Oh you mean a Skype phone. Or do you mean UMA or UBA or whatever the heck? Its more formally known as a confuse-opoly, where the market colludes to confuse the customers into being ripped off. Be careful, those guys aren't much above used car salesmen when it comes to ethics and marketing.

That said:

I've bought stuff from voipsupply and they're a reputable dealer. They have an entire freaking category for WIFI sip phones, I'm sure you'll like one of them. Eventually I'll buy one of them for my asterisk PBX at home. I've been saying that for at least half a decade now, but I will eventually buy one, I promise.

http://www.voipsupply.com/ip-phones/wi-fi

And the upstream SIP provider my asterisk PBX connects to is voicepulse. I would assume any "SIP wifi phone" could connect to voicepulse.

http://voicepulse.com/

Voicepulse's antifraud techniques are a bit of a pain to deal with, even a simple credit card change requires signed FAXes, etc. And their porting process required documentation reminded me of when I got my passport. Their dumbed down residential service did not seem to meet my needs, so I signed up as a "small business", where they just give me SIP trunks and otherwise leave me alone, which is exactly what I wanted. Also, speaking of SIP, those bastards lured me in by providing IAX which worked great over my NAT and firewall, and then promptly discontinued IAX and forced conversion to SIP which is a huge pain to NAT and firewall. The main (only?) reason I chose them over their competitors was IAX support, so I was quite pissed off. Other than that, I have nothing else to complain about, they're a reliable provider, it "just works", etc. The only reason I didn't dump them like a hot potato when they dropped IAX was their service has been reliable. God help me if I so much as have the smallest excuse I'm off to an IAX provider. But so far so good.

One big problem is my "pay as you go" cellphone provider nickel and dimes me, but it ends up only being about $10/month long term average. So, replacing my cellphone with a decent industrial/commercial grade wifi sip phone, costs around 2 or 3 years of cellphone service. So its hard to justify, except in the original poster's situation (or mine) where there is poor cell service at home. Also quite frankly, if I'm at home, I have my wired and cordless SIP phones, and if I'm at work I have work phones, and if I'm in my car I'm not supposed to be talking, and most places I go I'm not supposed to be talking on the phone (movie theater, etc) so paying hundreds of dollars to add another 9 to 99.9% coverage is a total waste for me.

We did it ourselves and saved >$100/month for a small business. Just use Asterisk (free and open source), buy some inexpensive but full-featured phones like the Grandstream GXP-2000 (about $80 each), and get a termination provider like VoicePulse Connect for Asterisk ($11/month for four simultaneous channels, free incoming, and below $0.01/min for most outgoing). It took some work to get it all set up and working properly, but now is actually more reliable than the analog phones ever were. (We had phone company issues every few months... just awful.)

--
Educational microcontroller kits for the digital generation.

• encrypted SIP - would make sure the information about who you're calling stays encrypted
• secure RTP (SRTP) - would encrypt the actual call audio (and video)
• encrypted IAX - would do both, though only between Asterisk endpoints

1. get a colo box
2. install a terminal server on it, IE LTSP type stuff, maybe VNC, maybe windoze box with terminal server. Also load up the usual web email etc, and also hook up a Jabber server.
3. install Asterisk on it
4. hire VoicePulse to get it phone service
5. Get each worker an IP phone. For those that often work at home, use Snom or AAstra, Grandstream if you're cheap. For those that are always on their laptop use a softphone like EyeBeam or SJphone, or maybe a WiFi phone (make sure it has encryption support). If you want to go all out, get everybody EyeBeam and a webcam so you can video chat. However keep in mind that softphones aren't great unless you have a headset connected 24/7, and even then they are still not as good as a real IP phone. Now get everybody connected to the terminal server.

That's the easy part. Anybody can spend money on crap. The key is making it work.
You will need employees who are DEDICATED to your company. When there is no office, there is no boss over the shoulder, so it is very easy for a non-dedicated employee to waste tons of time.
Keep everybody coordinated. Forums can be a good way to do this if people read them, a daily teleconference or at least group chat can work well. Some have suggested meeting physically once a week but I don't think this is needed if you keep your team coherent. If everybody knows their task and you have good communication, you could run the life of the company without ever meeting some of the guys.

http://connect.voicepulse.com//
http://asterisk.org//
http://store.voxilla.com/customer/home.php/

VoicePulse does not pay referral fees, so my recommendation is a freebie. Probably better that way...

Let us not forget some of my personal favorites.

I have found the best solution for Asterisk is to go with a full IAX carrier, such as VoicePulse and get rid of the expensive T1 trunks entirely.... http://connect.voicepulse.com/

Easy to setup and powerful because the IAX protocol automatically supports multiple inbound and outbound channels.... I have been using 22 different channels for our business for some time and never had a glitch... Very cool!!!

I have this:

http://sipphone.com/dlink/

With http://voipjet.com/ for 1.1c/min for US calls, and http://connect.voicepulse.com/ for an incoming line for $11/month for unlimited incoming minutes.

Mind you, the incoming line is, in the end, optional. And you can add money to your voipjet acct whenever you feel like it. Yes, it requires a unix server, but seriously, on Slashdot, if you don't have one, you must be new.

No ads either. =)

Having run my own OSS PBX, Asterisk for over a year now I was able to use its Call Detail Records (CDR) database to figure out that my best bet was to use Broadvoice and its unlimited in-state plan at $9.99/mo and Voicepulse with its DirectConnect! service to pay 2.4 cents/min for all other calls. I estimate my phone bills will be around $15/mo instead of paying SBC $38 just for local service!

Not to mention that I can now take and make multiple calls simultaneously.

It's all in knowing your usage when designing a provider solution but having your own PBX also gives you the flexibility to actually mix and match.

As usualy YMMV.

Well the main one that it's not SIP, so you can't take advantage of all of the SIP software and hardware. So I want it to ring an actual telephone.

Also:
- distinctive ring
- call forwarding
- voicemail

Check out some of this stuff: http://www.voicepulse.com/features/advanced/defaul t.aspx

I don't need all of that but its certainly a laundry list of cool VOIP stuff.

$220 million / 2.7 million users = $81.48 / year
$81.48 per year / 12 month = $6.79 / month

The average VOIP account only is only $6.79 per month? That doesn't seem right. I have one of the cheaper accounts available ($14.99, VoicePulse), so I am a little skeptical of that number.

From the linked article, Vonage has 750,000 customers. Assuming they are all on the cheapest plan:

750,000 x $14.99 x 12 = 134,910,000

Which would mean for all non-Vonage VOIP customers:

$85 million / 2 million customers / 12 months = $3.54 per month per customer

Given the other players involved (VoicePulse, Voicewing, AT&T, Time Warner), I have a hard time believing that number.

- Tony

I'm sure other VoIP providers have as good or better number porting abilities.

At my business all of our outgoing calls travel over virtual lines provided by the VoicePulse Connect service. We get to set up the line(s) as an IAX connection and all you do is buy minutes. Better yet, for outgoing calls you have as many lines as you attempt to use, it just uses 1 minute each minute per active line.

I didn't look through the article to see if you can do this with DV, but with Voice Pulse the quality of service has been superb! Kudos to them!

One feature of VoicePulse is the ability to have any caller that does not identify themselves via Caller ID get "telezapper" tones and be intercepted by an automated message asking the person to enter their phone number via touch-tone.

Autodialers don't stand a chance... six months and not a SINGLE telemarketing call.

Verizon offers a similar feature for $6 or $7 a month ... which is almost half of my TOTAL monthly VoicePulse bill ($15.44 total).

- Tony

I would like to be able to have DID (Direct Inward Dialing) however I have not found a VOIP company that supports that.

I currently use BroadVoice which does not. I hear VoicePulse might be able to provide that service but I have not tried yet.

Now you have Total Control of all that stuff (insert evil-genius maniacal cackle).

For example, I just use VP for outgoing long distance - outgoing local and incoming cone via my BellSouth landline via a Digium FXO card. Incoming calls don't even ring my phones (Plain Old Phones driven off a Digium FXS card) unless the caller-ID number is on a list. All others just go straight to voicemail.

Also, if I call from my cellphone, it'll tell me how many pending messages I have and let me press 1 to ring the phones (with a distinctive ring) or 2 to check voicemail (yes, I know CID can be spoofed...) My next project is to write a notification script that will page our cellphones if a message is left and is still there 15 minutes later (so, if someone is home and checks the message quickly, no need to page the cellphones).

In-progress: friends and family getting custom voicemail messages, and accounts to call us over IP with the Firefly IAX softphone software. (insert Tim Allen grunting)

You might want to look at http://connect.voicepulse.com/

What about bandwidth? From what im seeing, the required upload stream is at least 90KbitsPS+ http://www.voicepulse.com/learn/TechnicalRequireme nts.aspx and in some cases more(although they say 40K can be used with degraded quality). I cant speak for all the broadband users but in my own experience with comcast, they only offer 256K and i know of others that only offer as little as 128K up. Now, for the person who *uploads* alot ;), how is this going to work out? Is there a switching technology built in that allows the uploads on your computer to decrease when a call comes in? Now the obvious solution would be to get a faster internet provider, but sadly, that is all that is offered in my area [OC,MD]. The broadband needs to offer more before the masses(of geeks anyway) will join up with VOIP. Other then this lil problem, i think VOIP is amazing and will one day take over regular phone tech.

I've started to use Asterisk for various applications, including as a

- PSTN to VOIP gateway: combine a cheap server, asterisk, and a few $50 voicemodem cards and you've got a VOIP gateway that can connect your outside phone lines to any VOIP phone.

- VOIP to PSTN gateway: cheap server, asterisk, open VOIP provider like VoicePulse Connect, and some Digium FXS cards and you can connect every phone in your house to a VOIP network.

- PSTN/VOIP front-end to IVR gateway: cheap server, Asterisk, IVR provider like Voxeo and you can connect all of the above to custom voice recognition applications. (Asterisk has some built in IVR but its limited today.)

Several companies are starting to offer commercial PBX products based on Asterisk, including http://www.signate.com/ and http://www.fonality.com/.

In summary, Asterisk is becoming an amazing "telephony widget" - it can address a variety of telephony solution requirements, depending on how you configure it.

They connected their Asterisk PBX to the PSTN through a $500 card to a T1. How can I connect my Asterisk to my cablemodem (3/0.5Mbps)? What does it connect to over the WAN to complete calls to the global PSTN? Is it 100% reliable, with a complete footprint in urban areas, and failover to the rest of the POTS phones in the world?

Simple, use ethernet and get a voip provider instead of using a PSTN T1. I currently use http://connect.voicepulse.com/, and that works great for me. Pretty cool, because you can have multiple incoming calls over one connection.

I started doing this a week ago using Asterisk+NuFone.. hopefully NuFone doesn't have to change their rules any time soon. I thought about setting up a service, but was afraid of the legal consequences. Here's the easiest way to do this: Download and install this CD Xorcom Debian/Asterisk CD ( Linux+Asterisk Debian Distro ) Purchase a DID from Voicepulse Purchase $5.00 worth of minutes from NuFone.net Download the cidspoof.agi script Configure your extensions.conf in Asterisk.. fire it up, call the DID, enter the spoof number and outgoing.. voila. It will end up cost you like $15.00 for a month or 250 minutes worth of spoofing time. =)

You can use any decent recycled PC for the * server. I'm running a Duron 850 with 256MB RAM, but I understand even slower will work.

There are actually a couple of ways of doing it. You can use something like Voicepulse Connect and for $8 per month for an incoming number (48 states) and/or about $.03 a minute get calling anywhere in the USA or Canada. Even outbound local numbers cost this way, though.

The other option is to buy a digium fxs/fxo card and plug into the regular PSTN. The card can run as little as $150, I believe. Check out Digium for more info there.

A good way to get cheap long distance (at less than $.03 a minute) is to go with * and use the PSTN and Voicepulse connect (it is only a setting or two to make * do the differentiation). You route the local calls through the PSTN, and the long distance ones through Voicepulse connect. It depends, of course, on how much calling you do.

One caveat - VOIP and 911 emergency do not go well together.

Cheers,

s.

2. POTS costs a lot because the companies are gouging. VoIP has one use and one use alone - it will force the POTS companies to reduce their prices. Once they do, VoIP is dead (except insofar as it is already used internally by POTS).


When I can get a Verizon line which lets me:

* call all of Eastern PA and Western NJ as much as I want
* gives me 200 minutes of LD per month
* allows me to filter calls based on caller ID info
* prompts anonymous callers for their telephone number
* allows me to assign custom caller ID names for incoming numbers
* provides free call hunting

for $15.44 a month - then you have an argument. Right now, I can't even get a local-only telephone line (covering just my township) for that amount.

2. POTS also costs more because there are legal requirements on POTS that VoIP (currently) doesn't have to fulfill - for instance, the provision of emergency services. If VoIP had to provide that, you'd see your costs skyrocket.


I already pay for emergency services on my cell phone - and, in an emergency, I just use it. Why should I have to pay for it twice? Frankly, if I were a VOIP company, I would fight any such governmental requirement on this fact alone (eg, "95% of our customers have cell phones and would prefer to use them in an emergency instead of paying $3 more per month").

3. As an engineer, I expect everything to just work, and if it doesn't, I see bad engineering. You wouldn't accept a car that stopped every 50 miles. Why would you accept a phone service that crashed out every week? There is no reason for people to accept bad engineering.

That's pretty funny. People accept bad engineering every day. From computers, to electronics, to housewares, people make the choice to pay less for a lower quality product. Cripes, man, you don't have to look much further than most PCs to see a contra-indicator to your statement - do you honestly think the Windows product you see today would be anything like the Windows in a world where people don't accept "bad engineering".

Personally, I'm willing to "put up with" 99.9% uptime instead of 99.999% on my phones to save $600 a year.

And in fact, if VoIP is ever to truly compete with POTS - not just for service, but on equal ground with the requirement to provide 911 - they are going to have to make these systems properly robust.

No, they just need to make a product that is "close enough" to POTS, not a 100% replacement. Furthermore, the lower they can keep their prices relative to POTS, the more they can stray from 100%.

I fear an engineer who doesn't think this way.

I fear the engineer who does think this way because they are probably out of a job and looking to cause a ruckus. Except for a miniscule minority, price is a major factor in almost every purchase. The engineer that can't see the balance between "good enough" and "cost" should find another profession.

VoicePulse has had prices that low for a while, and they allow you to setup your own VoIP reseller type service, VoicePulse Connect. It works great with Asterisk, which they push as a solution. Very geek friendly.

--
Josh

VoicePulse has had prices that low for a while, and they allow you to setup your own VoIP reseller type service, VoicePulse Connect. It works great with Asterisk, which they push as a solution. Very geek friendly.

--
Josh

With Voicepulse Connect http://www.voicepulse.com/ I pay $7.99/mo for an unlimited minute incoming phone number and 2.95 cents/min for outgoing calls (local or long-distance). Even with a wife and two daughters my call accounting tells me I would spend less just paying by the drink than my SBC local analog line at $34 (taxes, fees and caller-id included) by almost $20/mo!
In short, you'd be surprised how few minutes you really do use.
On top of that you might want to consider Voicepulse connect because I now get multiple incoming calls and multiple outgoing calls at no extra cost other than that the meter runs for outgoing calls.

The catch? You gotta run Asterisk http://www.asterisk.org/ and get at least one FXS port card from Digium http://www.digium.com/.

Anything over $15/mo is robbery in my opinion

How about setting up your own Asterisk server (yes, it's Linux, but it works, get over it). Then you can use VoicePulse Connect! to get a cheap rate for an incoming line.

On my VoicePulse line I get:

- Unlimited calling anywhere in SE PA and SW NJ
- Voicemail
- Enhanced Caller ID (I can assign personalized names to incoming numbers)
- Call Hunting (send call to cell if I don't pick up at home)
- Multi-Ringing (ring home, cell, and work all at the same time)
- Anonymous Call Block
- Telemarketer Block
- Call Filters (send call from mom to cell, send call from Joe to work)
- Distinctive Ringing
- Call Forward
- Three way calling
- 200 minutes long distance

for $14.99 a month. No taxes or fees are added on top of that, either.

The closest Verizon gets to this is their Metro Unlimited service which is over $45 / mo and I don't get ANY of the cool features that I do with VoicePulse (Plus, my "unlimited calling area" is about half the size of VP's calling area). When I add the features I get with VP, I'm close to $60 / mo.

$60 is much greater than $15... on the order of $540 / year greater.

You might want to check out VoicePulse. They have a program called VoicePulse Connect! that is for people who just need a SIP and IAX connection.

They have some setup information for Asterisk in their knowledge base, you might want to check that out. Not sure if this is exactly what you need, but it might be worth a look.

You might want to check out VoicePulse. They have a program called VoicePulse Connect! that is for people who just need a SIP and IAX connection.

They have some setup information for Asterisk in their knowledge base, you might want to check that out. Not sure if this is exactly what you need, but it might be worth a look.

You might want to check out VoicePulse. They have a program called VoicePulse Connect! that is for people who just need a SIP and IAX connection.

They have some setup information for Asterisk in their knowledge base, you might want to check that out. Not sure if this is exactly what you need, but it might be worth a look.

Well, I was just spammed advertising Vonage not more than an hour ago, so they're definitely out.

Voicepulse or for the true geek Voicepulse Connect are well worth a look.

I've also heard good things about nufone

But test carefully before relying on it. For business use voice quality is pretty important and VoIP is at the "about as good as POTS" level, which might be acceptable or might not, depending on how sensitive you are to the difference in sound distortion between consumer grade VoIP and consumer grade POTS.

Well, I was just spammed advertising Vonage not more than an hour ago, so they're definitely out.

Voicepulse or for the true geek Voicepulse Connect are well worth a look.

I've also heard good things about nufone

But test carefully before relying on it. For business use voice quality is pretty important and VoIP is at the "about as good as POTS" level, which might be acceptable or might not, depending on how sensitive you are to the difference in sound distortion between consumer grade VoIP and consumer grade POTS.

Setup an asterisk pbx server, and signup with any number of VoIP providers who support G.711 codecs (like Voicepulse or their no bells service, Voicepulse Connect service). Plug your fax machine into a TDM400p card from digium.

Another option, pickup a Grandstream HandyTone 286 (from here for instance) or a Sipura SPA-2000 (from here for instance) (SIP devices, plug a regular phone, or fax, into it) instead of the asterisk box, but it gives you less flexibility. Both devices would work with the Voicepulse services, or most any other true SIP based VoIP service.

This works, been able to fax to people over Pulver's Free World Dialup service without any problems using both types of setup.

Setup an asterisk pbx server, and signup with any number of VoIP providers who support G.711 codecs (like Voicepulse or their no bells service, Voicepulse Connect service). Plug your fax machine into a TDM400p card from digium.

Another option, pickup a Grandstream HandyTone 286 (from here for instance) or a Sipura SPA-2000 (from here for instance) (SIP devices, plug a regular phone, or fax, into it) instead of the asterisk box, but it gives you less flexibility. Both devices would work with the Voicepulse services, or most any other true SIP based VoIP service.

This works, been able to fax to people over Pulver's Free World Dialup service without any problems using both types of setup.

VoicePulse

• Cheaper... unlimited local and national calling is only $22.50 (that includes all the extra taxes/addon fees) (though the FCC might add on extra charges next year)
• A lot of current features (caller ID, caller ID block, calling other lines if you don't pick up your VoIP phone) that seem like they don't cost the phone company anything, actually are free
• There are extra features you can't get anywhere else (or can't unless you're a big company with a digital call center)
  • number portability even if you move out of the area code or even the country (since your same phone number can be accessed anywhere there's internet access)
  • email notification of voice mail, with the option of including a sound file of the message
  • Multiple phone numbers going into the same line, complex filters indicating how they might be forwarded to different lines, different ring patterns, etc...
  • greater web integration (configuration of the account's features, realtime updates of your bill)

A couple days ago this /. article asked whether price competition would run VoIP-to-POTS companies out of business. It specifically mentioned Packet8, Vonage, and VoicePulse. I've been considering switching to a VoIP-to-POTS provider for quite a while now, and wonder what experience other SlashDotters have had with these or related services. To be specific, I want a solution that lets me use my regular analog phone through my broadband connection to call POTS users (e.g. my mom) AND gives me a phone # for others to call me. Solutions like Net2Phone (which I've used for years) or Skype that require me to use headphones/mic in front of my computer just don't cut it. Nor do I want to buy any new hardware (like SIPphone requires). Recent /. articles discuss Skype Vs. SIPphone and Other VoIP issues, but none contain the sort of info I'm looking for. What advice can you give about cost, performance, security, ease-of-setup, etc?

• Talk point-to-point using my computer, headphones, and a microphone
• Or buy two IP phones for $75/each to talk to one other person for free

• A real phone number
• Voicemail
• Dial any phone in the world
• Get calls from any phone in the world
• Still get free long distance
• Still talk free user-to-user

• Talk point-to-point using my computer, headphones, and a microphone
• Or buy two IP phones for $75/each to talk to one other person for free

• A real phone number
• Voicemail
• Dial any phone in the world
• Get calls from any phone in the world
• Still get free long distance
• Still talk free user-to-user

I use the features of voice-over-IP provider VoicePulse to accomplish what you are talking about. I know that you can't get VoicePulse in Canada, but maybe there are other VoIP providers there that I don't know about, who offer similar features. You sign up with them, and they send you a preconfigured Cisco ATA-186 to hook up to your broadband connection. You plug a telephone into the Cisco ATA to use it.

You can then set up anonymous call blocking so that callers without caller ID don't get through. You can optionally set it up to allow anonymous callers if they enter their phone number after prompted, which then gets sent to your caller ID as ??1234567890?? to indicate that the call was originally anonymous.

They also have "Telemarketer Block", which I assume is the same kind of thing the Telezapper does. I should probably turn it on, but I thought it might be annoying to callers.

You can also use their Do Not Disturb feature in combination with their Filter feature to send most callers immediately to voice mail, but allow your family to ring through. You do this by activating the Do Not Disturb feature, and then setting a filter for each family member's telephone number with the filter action set to "Always Ring" (the filter overrides the Do Not Disturb).

The filters are cool, you can set them up for individual callers with actions of "Always Forward", "Always Ring", "Always Voicemail", "Always Busy", or for the truly annoying, "Not In Service", which plays a "not in service" message. One final option they don't list in their promo materials, but appears on the Filter setup page when I am logged in to my account, is "Rejection Hotline". It supposedly plays a "humorous message provided by the Rejection Hotline." I haven't tried this option yet, so I don't know how lame it is, but I can guess...

I use the features of voice-over-IP provider VoicePulse to accomplish what you are talking about. I know that you can't get VoicePulse in Canada, but maybe there are other VoIP providers there that I don't know about, who offer similar features. You sign up with them, and they send you a preconfigured Cisco ATA-186 to hook up to your broadband connection. You plug a telephone into the Cisco ATA to use it.

You can then set up anonymous call blocking so that callers without caller ID don't get through. You can optionally set it up to allow anonymous callers if they enter their phone number after prompted, which then gets sent to your caller ID as ??1234567890?? to indicate that the call was originally anonymous.

They also have "Telemarketer Block", which I assume is the same kind of thing the Telezapper does. I should probably turn it on, but I thought it might be annoying to callers.

You can also use their Do Not Disturb feature in combination with their Filter feature to send most callers immediately to voice mail, but allow your family to ring through. You do this by activating the Do Not Disturb feature, and then setting a filter for each family member's telephone number with the filter action set to "Always Ring" (the filter overrides the Do Not Disturb).

The filters are cool, you can set them up for individual callers with actions of "Always Forward", "Always Ring", "Always Voicemail", "Always Busy", or for the truly annoying, "Not In Service", which plays a "not in service" message. One final option they don't list in their promo materials, but appears on the Filter setup page when I am logged in to my account, is "Rejection Hotline". It supposedly plays a "humorous message provided by the Rejection Hotline." I haven't tried this option yet, so I don't know how lame it is, but I can guess...

I use the features of voice-over-IP provider VoicePulse to accomplish what you are talking about. I know that you can't get VoicePulse in Canada, but maybe there are other VoIP providers there that I don't know about, who offer similar features. You sign up with them, and they send you a preconfigured Cisco ATA-186 to hook up to your broadband connection. You plug a telephone into the Cisco ATA to use it.

You can then set up anonymous call blocking so that callers without caller ID don't get through. You can optionally set it up to allow anonymous callers if they enter their phone number after prompted, which then gets sent to your caller ID as ??1234567890?? to indicate that the call was originally anonymous.

They also have "Telemarketer Block", which I assume is the same kind of thing the Telezapper does. I should probably turn it on, but I thought it might be annoying to callers.

You can also use their Do Not Disturb feature in combination with their Filter feature to send most callers immediately to voice mail, but allow your family to ring through. You do this by activating the Do Not Disturb feature, and then setting a filter for each family member's telephone number with the filter action set to "Always Ring" (the filter overrides the Do Not Disturb).

The filters are cool, you can set them up for individual callers with actions of "Always Forward", "Always Ring", "Always Voicemail", "Always Busy", or for the truly annoying, "Not In Service", which plays a "not in service" message. One final option they don't list in their promo materials, but appears on the Filter setup page when I am logged in to my account, is "Rejection Hotline". It supposedly plays a "humorous message provided by the Rejection Hotline." I haven't tried this option yet, so I don't know how lame it is, but I can guess...

I use the features of voice-over-IP provider VoicePulse to accomplish what you are talking about. I know that you can't get VoicePulse in Canada, but maybe there are other VoIP providers there that I don't know about, who offer similar features. You sign up with them, and they send you a preconfigured Cisco ATA-186 to hook up to your broadband connection. You plug a telephone into the Cisco ATA to use it.

You can then set up anonymous call blocking so that callers without caller ID don't get through. You can optionally set it up to allow anonymous callers if they enter their phone number after prompted, which then gets sent to your caller ID as ??1234567890?? to indicate that the call was originally anonymous.

They also have "Telemarketer Block", which I assume is the same kind of thing the Telezapper does. I should probably turn it on, but I thought it might be annoying to callers.

You can also use their Do Not Disturb feature in combination with their Filter feature to send most callers immediately to voice mail, but allow your family to ring through. You do this by activating the Do Not Disturb feature, and then setting a filter for each family member's telephone number with the filter action set to "Always Ring" (the filter overrides the Do Not Disturb).

The filters are cool, you can set them up for individual callers with actions of "Always Forward", "Always Ring", "Always Voicemail", "Always Busy", or for the truly annoying, "Not In Service", which plays a "not in service" message. One final option they don't list in their promo materials, but appears on the Filter setup page when I am logged in to my account, is "Rejection Hotline". It supposedly plays a "humorous message provided by the Rejection Hotline." I haven't tried this option yet, so I don't know how lame it is, but I can guess...

Packet 8: $19.95/mo with unlimited US calling or $5.95/mo with 8cents/min

Voice Pulse : $34.99/mo unlimited, $7.99/mo with 4cents/min

Vonage : $39.99/mo unlimited, $29.99/mo with 500 long distance minutes.

The only restriction with the first two of these services right now is the inability to call 911, but they are working on it. Vonage already has the ability to call 911 and it won't be long before the others start offering it too.

Vonage does something like this, except you only need magic box #2 (known as a Cisco ATA 186 (that'd be Analog Telephone Adaptor)). They deliver phone service over IP, incoming calls are routed from their switch to your broadband connection. I'm looking at getting something like this for myself, I just looked and also found netinternational and VoicePulse, who offer similar services, I'm sure there are others...