This weekend I -- finally -- got my Asterisk server to talk to my Sipura SPA-3000 and SPA-2002 to handle my phone line and desktop phones respectively.
Now, I need to call the phone company and turn off my voicemail, because the voicemail that is included with Asterisk (or, to be pedantic, the Asterisk@Home install) is so far superior to my telco-provided voicemail... e-mail delivery of my messages, web interface for accessing them, you name it.
Right now, I've got it in a base configuration... an incoming call (on my line, not D's) rings every phone station attached to the system, much like any other normal phone line. Of course, right now that's a sum total of one station, but that'll all grow.
Part of how this grows, or doesn't, depends on how I decide I want to use the system, and how D decides she does or does not want her phone line brought into the system.
The biggest issues with bringing lines into the system is turning off telco voicemail, which means that busy signals are busy signals (not voicemail), and turning off call-waiting (which means that busy signals are busy signals and not voicemail). In theory, I can certainly live with those restrictions on my own phone line, but D's line is her business' line... That's a big switch for something like that. Of course, the flip side of that is that then she could have a whole IVR front-end to her phone that makes her company seem bigger. Of course, she may or may not want that. :-)
In the meantime, our two phone lines come into two different architectures, which makes it all a bit awkward. Right now, we've got one of those "one base station, three different handsets" situations because the existing phone wiring in D's house is, to put it bluntly, fuxored. I can bring the VoIP phones to the upstairs, downstairs, etc., etc., with 802.11g bridges, but then we'd end up with two physical phones in each location? The cordless remote handsets and the stations that are wired to the Asterisk box? That doesn't make much sense, either. If I could regain trust in the house wiring, I could get two-line cordless phones, with Line 1 being attached to the VoIP system, and Line 2 to her phone line (or vice versa, whatever) ... I did manage quite a bit of corrective measures after I bought one of those cable tracing gizmotrons, so maybe that's an option. I'd like to try out one of those 802.11g cordless VoIP handsets, but I can't justify that until I know what we're doing with these lines.
Part of this is that I'd love to see our next phone switch at Vassar be something Asterisk based that was VoIP, and let the school have 100% control and ownership of it, but I need to have a better understanding of how it all works before I can advocate it.
So, for now, I'll keep tinkering. Just experimenting, and we'll see where it goes.