[ale] VoIP, CATV if fiber-served

[DJPfulio at jdpfu.com]

I ran both FreeSWITCH and Asterisk for a few years. Eventually, at home, I found it too much hassle and removed it.  With FreeSWITCH, the call quality was 16-bit. At the time, Asterisk was just 8-bit voice. Don't know if that's different now.  Asterisk has modules for thousands of things, it seems.

I connected a number of different VoIP providers to both.  Even had a SkypeOut account, which any of my phones could dial.  I was using Skype while traveling out of the country. Seems odd to make hotel reservations using a Skype account, calling a number is a South American country. This was before "apps" could handle booking a room easily.

Anyway, for a small setup, let the VoIP service do the PBX stuff for you. It is all cheap and their controls pages provide you access to enough PBX settings unless you want to make people get lost inside your IVR, I suppose.

On 3/14/26 20:22, Alex Carver via Ale wrote:
> I switched my phone to Telnyx. $1.50/month to have the phone line
> active and $0.003/minute per call.
> 
> I set up all my phones through Asterisk on a server in the house so
> I could also use digital phones but there's no reason you can't use
> a regular ATA and analog phones. I use a Grandstream HT813 ATA that
> provides both FXS (analog phone handsets) and FXO (analog phone line
> to provider). I use the analog line as an emergency backup to the
> normal VoIP, I set up Asterisk to look for a special prefix on the
> phone number to route calls through the analog FXO port instead of
> out through the VoIP trunk.
> 
> Have not seen an ATA that was coax input and RJ11/12 output (FXS),
> most ATAs you can buy are Ethernet to RJ11/12 FXS ports like the
> Grandstream HT501 (one port) and HT502 (two port).
> 
> On 2026-03-13 21:33, Ken Cochran via Ale wrote:
>> Hey again ALE people :) Hopefully not too-OT, y'all have any
>> favorite or non-favorite VoIP providers?  I need to find something
>> for the office (1st) & later for home.  Ooma looks pretty good but
>> I should look at others too.
>> 
>> Right now I have nothing but POTS via Spectrum & I just got a
>> sudden big price jump & I need to do something else. Q: What's the
>> box called that is coax in & RJ-11/14 & Ethernet out? Is that an
>> ATA? SIP?
>> 
>> AT&T is pulling fiber all over town, now available at my house &
>> it's been available at the office building for a few years now.
>> 
>> Hasn't ATT left the cable TV biz? If I were to do ATT fiber, what
>> to do about TV?  In my locality, Spectrum is the only cable (TV)
>> co. Thanks, -kc