What really brought this
article about Asterisk, an OSS VOIP solution, to my attention was that at my office we've been tinkering with a cheap way to implement VOIP into our workspace. I was surprised at the low cost of the hardware infrastructure to put it in place, such as the controlling server. It doesn't take much. You still need to get the phones, of course. This article discusses the pros and cons of using VOIP in your home, as well as the two Asterisk ways of implementing it. Asterisk is not for the feint of heart and does take skill and patience to get it properly working. Asterisk@HOME is meant to alleviate that, and is a GUI coupled with the Asterisk suite. Any techie interesting in in VOIP for your home or an office should take a look. It's fascinating stuff, really, and POTS has been long in the tooth for quite a while. A spare PC is all you need to get started, and even existing existing plain old analog phones can be implemented into it(though not fully).
