for those of you who live in shared houses and/or run businesses from home this system is worth a try.(I’ve been evaulating this for use in the office and am amazed at how powerful it is)
all you need is a spare PC (can be 3-4 years old), a working network and switch and analogue adapters for each normal phone line you want to connect
£20 will get you a single line card to connect to your normal phone line (for something like an office you can get 3-4 line cards for £150, also even ISDN or E1 if you use that at work)
£50 will get you a standalone adapter which connects to one phone line and one analogue extension (you plug a normal telephone into this)
£32 will add another two analogue extensions to the system,
you can also buy IP Telephones (from about £40-£loads if you want bling and lots of buttons and colour screens like what yuppies have in corporate offices), these plug into the network switch.
even a basic system in a shared house produces reports for each extension so no more arguing between housemates over phone bills.
Plus you can add as many VOIP trunks as you want, you can get cheap calls to all sorts of places (good if you have a multicultural house and people want to call “home!”) and you can even give people their own incoming phone number for their room/office without having to get extra lines from BT or Virgin/NTL..
you do need a bit of tech knowledge and time, and some idea of how telecoms works (as you have to often customise the kit for British tones and protocols) but don’t need to be a big-time Linux guru (I am not)
plus if 3 or 4 groups of you have this system you can link all the boxes together and provided your broadband is working you can chat independently of telephone companies or even VOIP providers…
http://www.trixbox.org
