>Dmitry, investigate Asterisk (e.g.
www.trixbox.org) and devices like Sipura 3102 or similar. Asterisk is open source = free. You won't need an answering machine, Asterisk can handle heaps of simultaneous voicemail instances with all the "press 1 for sales, 2 for service" etc stuff. You can have different answering options for each line or different responses depending what state they are dialing from or if it is an important customer or your wife's cellphone etc. You can also get a very cheap or even free extra voip line (e.g.
www.galaxyvoice.com, I've got a free MA(!) number with free voicemail, 60 minutes/month free national calls, very cheap national and international rates... and I can be making 3 outgoing calls via this voip and it will still ring if somebody calls in). Total cost for the Sipura devices < $200 for 2 normal phone lines and 2 normal internal extensions, you can use an old 386 desktop for Asterisk. If you need more extensions you can buy IP phones for as little as
>$50 and just plug them into your network for extra extensions.
John,
Thank you very much for your suggestions. I will follow the links and check it out.
"The creative process is nothing but a series of crises." Isaac Bashevis Singer
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"If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money that it values more, it will lose that too." W.Somerset Maugham
