You have provided such a great information on asterisk options. Yes there are a lot of options but what My experience is that when I tried to use software options especially SER/OpenSER, I faceds some problems in its installations and companies are developing OpenSER more user friendly. I am agree with you that If we search out we can find lots of VSP companies.

The VoIP/TDM Routes Marketplace

Software Options:

* Freeswitch – Former asterisk devs peeved about the direction/instability/crap code in Asterisk
* CallWeaver (formerly OpenPBX) – More peeved asterisk devs/users, tired of the dual licensing (and digium making money from their efforts) forked asterisk into a GPLv2 base and have been working heavily to fix all the problems digium won’t and it works on BSD a 1000x better then asterisk apparently
* SER/OpenSER – Most companies that use asterisk for a voicemail/queues/confs etc put SER or OpenSER infront to cope with the real grunt work that asterisk falls over with

etc

As for VSP companies, there are lots, and it really depends where you are calling etc.

This is indeed good idea. I have Vonage so I should check if it can forward the call to my UK mobile well.

The problem with Vonage though it may not work great with forwarding calls to some countries. At least when I call to rural Russian areas I may not get through from the first time.

This would be great to pick your brain.

I would use kall8.com for what you describe. They can do the PBX stuff that you want (Follow Me, scheduling, escalation, voicemail, and a bunch of other things).

They have a pretty sweet feature for the forwarding, where you can pick how and to who calls are routed. For example, you could have your big clients provide you with a phone number, and when they call from that number it can be routed directly to you so they don’t go through the on call person or you can do some other action with it.

They are pretty affordable to.

Then, I would get a service like Vonage for each of you that need to be on the phone system and have the kall8 stuff point to those numbers. The reason I’d use Vonage or other voip provider is because anywhere you have internet you can get calls (you can make them too if you’d like – much cheaper than a regular telco call from another country to the US because it would be just like you were in the US).

Then, I’d setup Vonage to have a ring list for all of your personal phones.

Essentially, Kall8 would decide who in your team gets the phone call and Vonage would decide where you get it (Vonage phone, cell phone, etc).

You can use normal phones with Vonage too. No special handsets needed.

To an extent, this is what we do and it has worked very well for us.

Quite useful.

Troy

If you are going to be in Heidelberg I can sit down with you and explain the basics of setting up what you need with Asterisk.

Cheers,
-Brian