Pre-sales advice for a VoIP newbie... ???
I have conventional phone line service, which is my principal inbound and local outbound phone, as well as for 911, 311, etc. calls & services. I also need to keep the phone line for my home alarm and for the nice convenient answering machine built into the cordless phone base.
I also have an
voip.ms account, which I'm going to use for all my pay-as-I-go outbound long distance calls (I don't use enough minutes each month to justify any prepaid monthly plan), whether from the home phone connected to the ATA, or from a softphone on my computer. (I've also set up a DID with
voip.ms to receive calls from conventional phones over VoIP, but that's irrelevant here.)
What I'd like to do is this: connect my phone and my phone line to the ATA's sockets so that local & service calls from the the phone attached to the ATA automatically go out on the conventional phone line (no E911 service costs), and long distance calls automatically go out on the VoIP Ethernet socket; inbound calls on the phone line must always reach the phone and its answering machine when I'm not there to answer itinbound calls to the VoIP account should also be routed to the phone attached to the ATA (although I use
voip.ms's answering service for missed/unavailable calls to the VoIP account, rather thanthe phone's answering machine).
So basically the ATA equipment I'm looking for would implement a permanent relay of the conventional phone line through the ATA to the actual phone attached to the ATA's telephone socket, plus some dialing rules to route calls from the phone to either the phone line socket or the VoIP interface (Ethernet socket).
And it really needs to be an automatic configuration, i.e. no manual keying sequences on the phone required to select the route through VoIP or the phone line, everything must be handled in the ATA's internal configuration. The OBI110 (at first glance) seems to require manual intervention to select the phone line or VoIP.
The other thing I neglected to mention is that I have a combined all-in-one DSL modem/router (TP-Link TD-W8960N) delivering the Internet connection, so the ATA would be sitting on the LAN, behind the NAT. I've already tested this combination with an unlocked DLink VTA: calls from regular phones to the DID number which I'd routed to the VTA came through successfully, as did calls in the opposite direction, from the phone attached to the VTA over VoIP to other conventional phones. So I'm assuming that the router's NAT & SIP ALG are doing the right thing (whatever that is...).
