[ale] OT Asterisk user contacts

[Jim Lynch]

I went down a similar route.  However, I dumped Asterisk in favor of 
FreeSWITCH and eventually FusionPBX.

My observations:
SIP provider, voip.ms, can be had for about $1.  Unless you sign up for 
additional features there are no monthly charges, just usage. You can 
deposit as much as you like, however,  the minimum is a dollar.  There 
are others, but for getting cheaply I didn't find any better.

I was running on a VM for a while and suffered a lot of dropped calls 
and stuttering.  I don't think that's a viable solution for production.  
I use a couple of ATAs, SPA112 and SPA122.  They work OK.  I had an 
SPA112 die on me last year.

If you are going to want FAX support, be sure to enable QOS on your 
network and create a VLAN for voip traffic.  While phone calls can stand 
a little dropout, FAXes hate it.

I had/have an A200 I used for a while, but it is a headache to get 
integrated into the system.  Maybe for Asterisk it is easier, but the 
instructions for configuring it for FS were not great and it took some 
magic for it to work.

I'm quite happy with FS and FusionPBX, now that  I have them on a 
dedicated server, an old Lenovo box.

Jim.