I've been running on Asterisk, actually Trixbox, for probably over a year now. It works ok but I have several issues that I've never been very happy with. For one thing I've been using an old version of the SCCP channel to run the Cisco phones. I have 7940's and 7960's and the SIP implementation on those phones is somewhat weak. The SCCP channel hasn't been developed much at all so there's not been much reason to upgrade. The problems I have though revolve around my 7905 flaking out occasionally and the laptop I run * on doesn't like to go on UPS power for any extended period of time. How weird is that?
Time to upgrade.
I have an older PC that I'm hoping will have sufficient power although I do have concerns. It's a Celeron 466 with 640mb of ram. * requirements are pretty light so hopefully it'll work ok. I'll be using the new version of the non-commercial Trixbox CE. I also have concerns about that but I'll give it a go. I've also discovered that there's been some new development on the chan_sccp side. Hopefully I can set up a more stable system and start extending it.
I'd like to figure out how to get Google Talk working with it so I can extend calls to my laptop. At some point I'm hoping the VoIP apps will come about on the iPhone and I'll be able to extend calls to it. I read something the other day about someone finally testing a demo app for this but it struck me as being very preliminary.
I've also discovered a service called freecall.com. I'm going to see about giving this a shot too. From what I can tell you get 300 free minutes per week. I'm sure there's a catch that I'm missing but I'll find out.
I was considering going to CallManager 6 since DLU's are now included but that would leave me with the problem of voicemail. I could do Unity but the demo license only supports a 30 second message and that won't cut it. Extending the system to support other VoIP methods will be easier with * too. Just too hard to justify it for home use.