question

[Chris Halls]

Hi Jason

This mailing list is for us to discuss the development of packages of asterisk 
and VoIP software for Debian Linux, and isn't really the right place for 
these sorts of questions. 

I'll try to answer your questions, but you would be better asking more 
questions on the asterisk mailing lists, asterisk-users[1] or 
asterisk-biz[2], which is for discussing commercial use of asterisk and VoIP 
providers.

On Thursday 22 February 2007 19:53, Jason Clements wrote:
> I currently have a standard phone line with several calling
> features through a large phone company but would like to possibly
> transition to voice over ip.  

This is certainly possible with asterisk, it's just a question of what exactly 
you want to do. If you use asterisk, you need to have a computer running 
asterisk 24/7, a good connection to the internet and a VoIP provider that can 
provide VoIP service for your phone numbers. You also need a VoIP phone or an 
adapter ('ATA') that converts VoIP to an analogue phone port.

> I currently have one phone line for my 
> business and a1-800 phone # tied to that line also.  

Asterisk can do multiple phone lines. For the 1-800 you need a service 
provider that can do 1-800 numbers, of which there are many.

> If I do transition, I 
> would like to be able to keep my same phone #.

That's called number porting, and again there are several providers which will 
do this. A good place to start looking for providers is on the voip-info.org 
pages[3].

[1] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
[2] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
[3] 
http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/VOIP+Service+Providers+Residential#NorthAmerica

Chris