Hi, So I stopped by the #wlug IRC channel yesterday and had a good chat to some of the Waikato geezers about Asterisk and VOIP in general. It was good to see a fair amount of enthusiasm. Here's a quick sumarry of some of the information I provided. Digium http://www.digium.com are the main force behind the Asterisk http://www.asterisk.org soft switch. Digium make their money selling hardware for Asterisk, which comes at a premium. An Asterisk PABX is a Linux box that handles the telephony interfaces via PCI cards. Digium sells many different types of these. For connecting Asterisk to a single, ordinary telephone line, a 'FXO' card is required. Digium's FXO card is called the Wildcard X100P which retails for $USD100. An alternative exists however, from Digitalnetworks, here; http://www.digitnetworks.com/store/product_info.php?products_id=28&osCsid=c74c43771d660ef93f72e4eb5644fc71 This is an equivalent FXO card, that works with Asterisk, for $USD18.50 - it doesn't come with steak knives. A linux box + FXO card is the minimum requirement for Asterisk, however a phone capability is nice to have. The alternative is to use 'soft phones' which means 'a telephone application on your desktop pc.' A normal telephone can be connected to an Asterisk server via an 'FXS' PCI card. While this allows you to reuse your current telephones, the drawbacks are that FXS cards are expensive and echo cancellation can be problematic. An alternative exists in the form of SIP phones. SIP phones are nodes on your data network, that have an IP address and often an embedded web server for configuration. I recommend Grandstream Budgetones, which despite their silly name, are a great phone. Grandstream has pictures of them here; http://www.grandstream.com/y-product.htm The Budgetones retail for roughly $USD65 http://www.voip-info.org contains a plethora of information about VOIP, particularly Asterisk - it's a great resource if you want to familiarise yourself with this tech. I'll update the WLUG Wiki with some information on NZ specific stuff, once my configs have been tidied. In the meantime, feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Regards, Simon.