[Aaug] SIP/IAX2 Provider

[Brian Whigham]

> Are there any providers that are good that will allow
>>me to use either an ATA or Asterisk?  Then that line would be my real-
>>world line for the PBX.

Chris,

That's the idea behind protocols.  Asterisk speaks several, including
MGCP, H.323, SIP, IAX, & IAX2.  If the provider speaks that protocol,
you can connect Asterisk directly to it.  There are ATAs that speak IAX2
or SIP (probably requiring a firmware change).

And, as you found, you may have a different provider for outbound calls
vs. inbound calls.  Look for DID to find a direct-inward-dial provider.
You'll find a local phone number for as little as $2.92/mo.  The lowest
price I've found is SIPphone.com (aka Gizmo Project).  Conveniently,
I've also found them to be one of the most reliable and cheapest
termination providers.  They're $0.01/min. outbound.  Inbound minutes
are free.  Since I use my cell phone most of the time, I'd only get my
money's worth out of Packet8 if I used 1,709 minutes/mo.  I've been
using my pre-paid $10 to Gizmo for months now.  I use other providers in
case of failure. I've found Voxee and voipjet to be cheap.  But, voipjet
recently did something with requiring volume.  And Voxee has been
unreliable for me.  There are also some free DID providers, though voice
quality hasn't impressed me with them.  Look for < 50ms latency to the
provider to avoid excessive delay.

Down the road, you might also be interested in having several incoming
numbers and termination providers.  There's a functionality called
least-cost-routing (LCR) which looks up the destination and chooses the
cheapest provider dynamically.

http://voip-info.org has a page with the cheapest ATAs, DIDs, and
termination providers.

see how fun VOIP is?

Brian