Thank you for your reply. As you correctly indicated, MOST service providers do not allow you to arbitrarily set the number for outgoing ANI or caller id purposes. Indeed, I have accounts set up with many providers, including Callcentric, VoIPms, Callwithus, and Vitelity, and those accounts all work flawlessly from the Obi2182. For those providers, the settings for the account determine outgoing calling number. I made an account with BulkVS because their rates are extremely low compared to the others and I wanted to try them out. I have set up the service on my asterisk pbx and it works great. On asterisk, I am able to set outgoing caller id for each trunk I have. I had a problem getting BulkVS to work with a grandstream ATA because it did not have a setting for setting the outgoing caller number. My outgoing calls would fail because my account user id was being sent as the calling number. I researched and realized that if you put a telephone number in the user id field and put your account user id in the Auth user id field that the calls would complete ok. I tried this methodology on the Obi but it does not work for me.
BulkVS seems to be geared for resellers, and there is no outgoing caller number associated with your account. In fact, you can have outbound calling with them without having any telephone numbers at all associated with the account. When you make an outgoing call on BulkVS, whatever outgoing caller id is sent by the equipment is passed through by BulkVS. In their explanation to me, "Whatever number you send to us we pass on as the calling number". So, there is no confusion between me and BulkVS, I just need to figure out a way to make the Obi send a valid telephone number as the calling number instead of my account number. If anyone knows a way I would appreciate it. Thanks all so much for your time.