Folks Some of the terminology baffles me so I'll ask.  I want setup a gateway on my home ADSL network.   The idea is that if I'm out of town I can somehow hit my own PC/network at home from my laptop at clients or hotel room, with my speakers and microphone, and make an outgoing phone call from my own phone.   (I have the software in place so I know what IP address is at my home network. I can currently Terminal Server in quite nicely.) Yes, yes, I know I could use Skype or whatever but I want to do this all myself. Among other things the phone number on the callerid will be my own. Thanks, Tony

 I want setup a gateway on my home ADSL network.  The idea is that if I'm out of town I can somehow hit my own PC/network at home from my laptop at clients or hotel room, with my speakers and microphone, and make an outgoing phone call from my own phone. Well, this is trivial if you have a voip service provider that lets you bring your own phone.  You just set up your computer (or take another ATA along on the trip with you) and configure the same account-name/password into it as your home unit.  Both units will ring for incoming calls and either unit (or both) can make outgoing calls and show the same caller-id number.  The voip service providers that charge by the minute usually couldn't care less how many ATA's you provision for the same account.  There are quite a few that charge in the 2-3 cent per minute range, so we aren't talking about a lot of money. A list of mostly per minute providers can be found at this next URL. I use both Gefachi and Teliax.  Both have no monthlies and have 2 cent minutes.  There are probably others that popped up since the last time I checked the field.  If you find others, please speak up.         http://www.voip-info.org/wiki/view/VOIP+Service+Providers+B2B The voice service providers that charge you a flat-fee per month usually don't even let you look at the settings in your ATA.  They have no interest in letting you program several units for the same account.  Unless you make over 1000 - 2000 minutes of calls per month you'd probably want to avoid these guys anyway.  The numbers for the per minute service will be much more favorable. Now if you are asking about using your normal analog phone line via a voip call over the net, you can do that too.  Some ATA's like the Sipura SPA-3000 will let you call out on your analog phone after calling into the unit via VOIP.  I have one of these and that trick does work, but the quality of the connection isn't that great.  I ended up just using the SPA-3000 as a souped-up answering machine (along with asterisk).  I ask people to just call my voip number and ignore my analog line all together. -wolfgang

Some ATA's like the Sipura SPA-3000 will let you call out on your analog phone after calling into the unit via VOIP.  I have one of these and that trick does work, but the quality of the connection isn't that great.  I ended up just using the SPA-3000 as a souped-up answering machine (along with asterisk).  I ask people to just call my voip number and ignore my analog line all together. So what does ATA stand for?  When I visit http://www.sipura.com/products/spa3000.htm I know what the PSTN acronym means, I think, but not ATA   What dos FXO mean? What do I use as a search term to find devices like this one?   Tony

The idea is that if I'm out of town I can somehow hit my own PC/network at home from my laptop at clients or hotel room, with my speakers and microphone, and make an outgoing phone call from my own phone.   Oh yeah, when I'm not travelling I spend a fair bit of time in a friends coffee shop so it'd be nice to make phone calls from there instead of using my more expensive cell phone.  <smile Tony

So what does ATA stand for?  When I visit http://www.sipura.com/products/spa3000.htm I know what the PSTN acronym means, I think, but not ATA What dos FXO mean? ATA probably stands for analog telephone adaptor .  FXO is a telco word that means connects to a switch in contrast to FSO which connects to a telephone .  Aren't you glad you asked. I don't think there are any other ATA's that connect to incoming phone-line side of things (fxo).  All the other ones I know of have one or to telephone interfaces (FSO's).  You can try your luck googling for ATA FXO , but I suspect all roads will lead back to the SPA-3000. The only other possibilities I know of are running asterisk and getting a cheap fxo PCI card.  The official asterisk card by itself is about the same price as the spa-3000, so you don't save any money going that route, but you do get the flexibility of using asterisk as a really tricked-out fully-programmable answering machine. -wolfgang

So what does ATA stand for?  When I visit http://www.sipura.com/products/spa3000.htm I know what the PSTN acronym means, I think, but not ATA What dos FXO mean? ATA probably stands for analog telephone adaptor .  FXO is a telco word that means connects to a switch in contrast to FXS which connects to a telephone .  Aren't you glad you asked. You can try your luck googling for ATA FXO , but the pickings are fairly slim.  I just looked and in addition to the Sipura SPA-3000 there is now the Grandstream Handytone ATA-488. The only other possibilities I know of are running asterisk and getting a Digium FXO PCI card.  The official asterisk card by itself is about the same price as the SPA-3000, so you don't save any money going that route, but you do get the flexibility of using asterisk as a really tricked-out fully-programmable answering machine.  Thats more or less what I do, but I use a SPA-3000 to keep the phone line at least one black-box away from my computer. -wolfgang