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Trusting Skype "fortunately-nobody-does-it-like-us P2P" for an emergency call? Well, at least it might get you a Darwin award... :/

As POTS replacement, I use (and would recommend) JustVoip coupled with E911 service from SIPgate (and a tiny UPS for the ATA and router/modem) => true emergency dialing for $2/mo.
Plus, naturally, others calls remain way cheaper than Skype given how many SIP providers there are to choose from...

Have an Android phone? I think there are SIP clients for Android as well.

Don't have either, just want something that's a WIFI SIP phone? Check out VoipSupply.com. They have a WIFI phone section. I'd either go cheap with the QuickPhones GA-342 or spend a little more for the Hitachi IP3000.

You'll need a SIP VOIP service. Check out Voip-Info.

Of course, test before you commit to something! There are free "toll-free-only" sip providers, which will allow you to test to see if it really works.

--Pathway

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

A basic SIP phone that is WiFi only ... nothing more, nothing less.

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.

Looks like these would fit the bill:

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

(SIP phones cost $90+)

I also used to believe that. Technology and mass production have dropped prices dramatically. Back when asterisk was a "new idea to me", seems like at least a decade ago, sip phones were hundreds of dollars, so I said, forget about asterisk.

I was surprised when I priced out ip phones a couple years ago.

http://www.voipsupply.com/gs-200

$54 each plus shipping.

This is by no means a stripped down phone. It has most features you'd expect in a desk phone. I have no connection with Grandstream or Voipsupply other than being a happy customer w/ three of those phones, and absolutely no problems whatsoever, they just work...

Somewhere in my office, I have the remains of a bulk pack of ATA (analog telephone adapters) that I bought on sale for something like $50 for five. You have to shop carefully to spend less on the ATA than on the long CAT-5 cables to connect them. The "worst buy" $50 25 foot cat-5 cable is a bit unreasonable to connect a $10 ATA that has a $15 analog phone plugged into it. For testing, experimentation, and educational purposes, a couple $10 ATAs, 7 foot patch cables, and $5 walmart phones works pretty well.

Get everyone to get a phone like this:
http://www.voipsupply.com/product_info.php?product s_id=802

Install Trixbox on a healthy server for your voip gateway:
http://www.trixbox.org/

If you put the server on the local campus network and the campus is covered with Wi-Fi, bam you are done. If you can put the server on a public static IP then everyone with one of these phones can make a call to someone else with one of these phones where ever VOIP can travel over the internet. If you really wanted to, you could add a few lines via VOIP suppliers to offer outbound calling. You could charge a small monthly and get unlimited minute VOIP lines for outbound calls. Inbound calls could be routed via DID but that is a lot bigger than you wanted.

the ut starcom "works" you can make calls with it and take calls with it. However the phone itself leaves alot to be desired,. its very clunky and slow and is very weak. It is much like a motorola startech or whatever from the early 90's cell phone world. it works.. thatts it.

personally I think the linksys WIP330 is much better

http://www.voipsupply.com/product_info.php?product s_id=1563

Also, compare the product image here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000JI75GU/ref=pd _cp_e_title/002-3832442-2513669

To this one here: http://www.voipsupply.com/product_info.php?product s_id=2248

Again, Photoshopped or actual product photograph, anyone own one? It seems if nothing else that Voipsupply is more responsive to Cisco's product photo updates. I wonder why Amazon couldn't be bothered to play ball.

Cisco phones obviously ship with SCCP firmware. However, Cisco has also created SIP firmware which you can choose to use instead. So you can use the original SCCP phone with Asterisk if you load the SCCP channel driver. Or, you can load the SIP firmware on the phone and use it with SIP on Asterisk. The later one is the preferable one because Asterisk's SCCP support is a bare minimum, while the Cisco SIP firmware is pretty good.

A lot of people pickup a Cisco handset off of Ebay and think they'll easily just start using it with their Asterisk server. To get access to the SIP firmware, you need a current Cisco support agreement (which is a PIA to get if you aren't a corporate customer). A support agreement for a single phone is pretty cheap (around $10 I think), but you also need to buy a license to use the SIP software, which is around $200-300 IIRC. Alternatively, you can find the firmware on several P2P networks, but it takes a lot of luck to do so. IMHO, it really isn't worth doing unless you're purely looking for a learning experience or already have a Cisco phone laying around. You're much better off picking up an Aastra 9220i hand set. It's SIP out of the box, has a great feture set, and is *much* cheaper than any Cisco phone. Plus it actually has a backlight! (Which is a feature that you don't really think about unless you don't have one). Honestly, even if they were the same price, I'd probably still buy Aastras for a small-office rollout.

If you want to email me: Sure. (It's a spamgourmet address).

SIP already allows for the negotiation of the most mutually preferred codec. Problem solved.

All of these IM-based voip solutions are to SIP in the voip world what MSN and AOL IM are to Jabber in the IM world. They are fun toys, but they aren't intercompatible long-term solutions. SIP is robust, well supported, and awesome. As it progresses and society becomes more dependent on it, firewalling issues will rapidly fade, and you'll get a situation similar to how virtually all firewalls allow port 80. Granted, SIP could have been made more firewall-immune in the first place, but this is really its only significant problem. The only other one I'd mention is that very few SIP phones have a full keyboard or straightforward way of entering in full sip addresses, which look just like email addresses and can have letters. This should also hopefully fade once it becomes more ubiquitous, and people need to call other networks more often, and will need that @domain in there.

The range of SIP telephones is amazing. Check out this bad boy at voipsupply.com

I bet the InFusion device is missing the same thing as every other WiFi device (eg. the wireless ZyXel VoIP phone) .. it can't authenticate on the wireless authentication gateway that is at universities, pay-"Hot spots" etc.

How about some sort of XMLRPC protocol, so this authentication could be automated? It still sucks that I have to fire up my browser to enter my username/password, which is store in there anyway..

Froogle search: SPA-3000.

Nothing in the article, and nothing in the comments above, fully explains the benefits of Asterisk for a small business or home. Transferring calls to a second line? Voicemail to email? What else?

Froogle search for the Digium card: Wildcard TE110P

T1 hardware: 24-Port FXS Analog Gateway (SIP).

Since you're using SPA-1001M's right now, I'm guessing you want FXS-to-IP, not channel banks as other repliers have suggested. I googled for "24-port FXS" and the third link was this 24-port FXS-to-SIP adapter. VoipSupply even has a section header for "High Density Analog Adapters"

or were you expecting something dirt-cheap?

Since you're using SPA-1001M's right now, I'm guessing you want FXS-to-IP, not channel banks as other repliers have suggested. I googled for "24-port FXS" and the third link was this 24-port FXS-to-SIP adapter. VoipSupply even has a section header for "High Density Analog Adapters"

or were you expecting something dirt-cheap?

There is a cheaper/better FXO/FXS from Grandstream, the Handytone 488. This is a new item and can be bought for under $90. It is extremely small (a little smaller than the SPA-3000) and handles all the popular codecs. Its configuration is a little easier to understand than the huge Sipura menus. It works right away without SIP registration (Sipura needs a setting in order to work without SIP registration) which allows you to test it by placing calls to IP numbers directly.

Sipura units seem to have much more provisioning support but Grandstream supports the same provisioning protocols. This can help with large deployments where you want to automatically assign extension numbers from a central server.

Again, this a new product that just went into production and might save you a few bucks over the Sipura in quantity. See http://voipsupply.com/ and http://www.grandstream.com/ for some more detail.

Kris

I couldn't find the price in the article-- may have missed it. Went to the Sipura sight and they don't sell directly to end users. They do have links to sites that do sell to end-users and I found it for $99

• http://www.voip-news.com/1/voipwifi.htm
• http://www.zyxel.com/product/P2000W.php
• http://www.vonage.com/
• http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2005/ voIP_WiFi.asp
• http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?se ction=platforms&id=1761
• http://www.voipsupply.com/home.php
• http://www.voipuser.org/forum_topic_1072.html
• http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php

You could buy a box like SPA-1001 sign up for FreeworldDialup and have the same thing. Plus you can enable IP dialing if you so wish.

I have one of these devices at my house connected to Freeworlddialup. My sister that is away at college calls from her dorm room with her computer using a Softphone. It works pretty good.

Wifi handhelds are around the corner

or here.

Not a commercial, but you can add regular telephones to this great PBX system by going to www.voipsupply.com Most consumer SIP equipment is locked for Vonage, CallVantage, or Net2Phone. This shop sells non-configured versions which you can simply plug into your network, configure, and go. There are single- and dual-port analog adapters with FSX support, and fairly nice (and cheap) desktop phone sets, all SIP compatible.

Well, this isn't technically true or necessary anymore.

Asterisk was a vehicle to get people to buy Digium products that interface the telephones with the PBX, and interface the PBX with the telcom lines (PRI, T1, etc.).

Now that you can purchase SIP-to-POTS adapters for $50 and real SIP desk phones for under $70 from www.voipsupply.com and hook them directly into your network, there really isn't a need for Asterisk anymore. We really needed and wanted a pure SIP solution.

Asterisk wants to use its IAX protocol for PBX communications which admittedly is a nice lightweight protocol but isn't standardized and you cannot buy affordable IAX-compatible products. If you're building a medium-to-large PBX and want to tie yourself into Digium hardware you can get a deal on the the PCI cards that interface Asterisk with PRI and T1 lines. Forget the IAX-to-POTS adapters (for your analog desk phone)--they are horribly expensive compared to the $50 2-line SIP adapters you get from VoIPSupply.com. Of course Asterisk will talk SIP but it really wants you to talk IAX and it will gateway the SIP to IAX protocol, imposing a slight, but sometimes significant, delay in voice communications which is never acceptible.

Thank you SIPfoundry for the sipX project! I have been looking for alternatives to the Asterisk product for a long time. The key to affordable technology is commodity hardware based on standards. I can't argue with that.