Amiga GVP PhonePak - fax, voicemail, answerphone

[amigadave]

alexh wrote:
The card that broke a thousand Amiga's.

What!?!

I have two cards and was going to set them up in one of my Amiga's to run my business phone to receive FAXes and Voicemail.  So, please let me know why you wrote the above quote.

[amigadave]

alewis wrote:
@Dave

I experienced no problems at all with the PhonePak. You do need to do some planning - I recommened on paper - prior to installation/configuration; notably mailboxes and mailbox routing, and answerphone messages. But this is the same with any VM or PBX software. I've been managing IVR systems for years, and without prior planning it gets very messy, very quckly.

Thanks for the warning and advice, but I have experience with two IVR systems that I managed over the last 15 years, up until two years ago when I changed jobs.  

The setup and recording all the prompts is time consuming, but not too complex.  I think I can handle the 2 or 3 mail boxes and FAX option.  

I am just hoping that receiving and sending FAXes with the PhonePak is well implemented and works well, as my other FAX machine broke a while back and I have need for one about two or three times a month and I expect that to increase by 300% to 500% in the coming month of August (I have a client project that will require a lot of FAXes back and forth and not all of them can be converted to email documents).

I was going to install the cards in an A2000, then decided to change that to perhaps my A3000T.  I hope that they will not have problems with Buster11

[amigadave]

alewis wrote:
Ah, apologies - the egg sucking that may been perceived was entirely unintentional! I've met a number of very inexperienced people, who have come unstuck very rapidly, trying to use solutions such as Asterisk to create IVR... the resultant maze of dead-end options is a joy to troubleshoot ;-)

If you are interested in it, I'll highlight again that I mislaid the original disks but have copies on CD-ROM.

Thanks for the offer, but I have a couple sets of original floppy disks.  If I find that both are corrupted, I will contact you to ask for a copy of your CD-ROM.

Do you have any experience sending and receiving FAXes with the PhonePak?  Also, do you know if it can be connected to a VOIP phone service instead of the local phone company.  I was thinking of checking out Skype or Vonage business plans to get a couple of phone numbers (voice and FAX) for my consulting business that I run from my home.  I guess I could just use one phone number and set an option in the PhonePak menu to send or receive the FAXes.

As for trouble shooting dead end options on any IVR systems, I know what you mean.  What is worse is being on the other side of the problem and being lost while trying to use the IVR system.  I really don't care for IVR systems when I am the customer, but they are only slightly worse than being transferred to a customer service representative that is from another country and barely speaks your language and doesn't understand common sense, or the problem you are calling about. :madashell:

[amigadave]

whiteb wrote:
Awesome stuff, so when do we get Asterisk for Amigados LOLZ

Anyway, for VOIP you would need the software to support G711 (u/a) or G729, and a network card to route the packets obviously.  Awesome stuff, does Amiga Hardware Database have details about these ?

I was thinking that I would use my Dell Monster Tower to run the VoIP software and just find out if they have hardware to send the phone signals back out of the Dell PC to a regular phone.  If yes, I was hoping that the signals going to a regular phone from the Dell PC could be plugged into the Amiga's PhonePak and it would think it was connected to a conventional phone service line.

Maybe this is not possible, but I am thinking that VoIP phones are available, but then they are probably quite different than regular phones.  Oh well, it was just a thought that was not researched yet.

[amigadave]

@alewis,

Thanks for the detailed reply.  It is a little confusing though.  First you say what I want to do can't be done and then it seems that you say it can be done and describe a couple different ways to do it.

Are the routers with voip pstn ports very expensive?  I might have an old PIII around here to run the PBX based on Asterisk, but I have no idea what Asterisk is, or which Linux version I should host it on?