What equipment is required to set up VoIP and approximately what will it cost?

What equipment is required to set up VoIP and approximately what will it cost?

I will be setting up VoIP gateway with 02 Nos E1 lines. I am about to hire technical experts to configure. What equipment will be required for this and approximately what will it cost?

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It sounds like you want to have some subscriber base on IP Phones, which will call through a server and will handle authentication and billing and that will direct the calls to an IP to E1 gateway in Columbo. The gateway you'll buy will have to support the same VoIP protocol that the server and IP phones support. SIP is likely your best choice for a VoIP protocol. It will allow you a lot of flexibility in choosing VoIP phones, and you could use an open source SIP server such as the SIP Express Router (SER) from IPTel.org. You can use any SIP compliant gateway or gateways, such as the MX25 from Zultys.

In terms of cost, SIP phones can be obtained for USD $100 or less. (one example is the Zultys ZIP 2. The SER is freely downloadable and would just require some technical expertise to configure. The MX25 gateways cost approximately $2500. For the SER you'd likely want to see this.

This was first published in August 2004