All: I'm well into lab investigating Asterisk - and have now reached the point where I can make it sing and dance to my own precise tune. Took a long while to figure out the dialplan & interrelationships of various config files and contexts. If I was a telephony guy I'm sure it would have been easier, as I just had to learn a bunch of concepts that phoneboys would understand without thinking. I'm now hoping to start playing with a hardware SIP phone or two and was looking for suggestions. I've made various softphones work on various platforms, and have made analog phones work well via both Digium FXS and Sipura FXS ports as well as IAX-ATA interfacing. Softphones seem to pay a strong penalty for complex codecs, resulting in echo and lag. The ATA adapters seem much better as the overhead of handling the codecs is embedded in the device. I'm sure quality of SIP phones and embedded horsepower to handle transcoding makes a huge difference in voice quality, lag and echo. Any thoughts? Any suggestions about SIP phones? Suppliers? Am I better to look at eBay? -- Bill Strosberg -- OCLUG general discussion list OCLUG [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca http://www.oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/oclug