I've got Asterisk at home (running Asterisk at home) and it works pretty 
good although the things you need to worry about are who you are getting 
your service from, if it is using Digium and analog lines no problem if 
it is from a provider do lots of traceroutes before signing up and check 
the boards for any issues with them.  I'm using VoicePulse and some 
dispute between Sprint and Verizon screwed my service for more than two 
weeks.  My provider moved to a new hosting site and now I'm in an ideal 
spot - my ISP to major ISP to their ISP.  Works great.  But I still have 
occational issues which I have not been able to track down and I'm not 
finding good resources to see if it is my router, my asterisk system, or 
the remote asterisk system or whatever.  I'm starting to setup some MRTG 
graphs to see what my router is doing at the time but I'm not getting 
anywhere and it is pretty intermittant. 

In any case I also use the IAXy device (although there is another IAX 
protocol ATA for half the cost now) to interface my old analog phones to 
the system and that works great and I've used a couple little IAX 
softphones that work pretty darn good (although Stunnel was causing some 
issues with them when talking remote).

All in all it is a great system with lots of power and flexibility, but 
I need some more good troubleshooting techniques and perhaps I'm going 
to actually have to pick up a book to start looking into that.  I do 
recommend VoicePulse as they have a very Asterisk friendly IAX service 
that is a half cent a minute long distance and free incoming with an 11$ 
a month per phone number charge, plus that gets you 4 lines.  Although I 
need to investigate if that actually works out to 8 lines as you setup 
the two redundant servers each with 4 lines each.

I did work for a large company that ran it for all phone systems and we 
had no issues but we were using all PRI lines to connect to the PSTN.

--j

Jeffrey Lehman wrote:
> I'm planning on setting up a small phone system (~5 phones) using
> Asterisk for an organization and I'd like to hear what others who have
> used Asterisk think of it.  What do you like about Asterisk and what
> issues have you had?  Would you recommend using Asterisk over a
> commercial PBX system and why?
>
> If the system is implemented, we would start off using the Digium cards
> to interface with two analog phone lines, so I'm curious to see if
> anyone has any experience with Asterisk and those cards and any issues
> along those lines.
>
> I've put together a proposal for this organization and am just lacking
> any previous experience, so responses would be used to put into the
> proposal. 
>
> Feel free to respond on or off list whichever you're most comfortable with.
>
> Thanks
> Jeff Lehman
>
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