Pro SE or CE

Hi. Either version would work for your needs. For what you are asking for, "just set it up and forget it", pro would work for you, but the only issue is relying on Fonality's servers. They are known to go down, and would therefore not work if your internet or their servers go down.

CE has been becoming more and more stable. Personally I would take the extra time to set up CE since you can use it with your internet down and you don't need to rely on Fonality.
What I am telling you is my opinion. Others may say the opposite.

Regarding the phone, I'm talking to you right now from my phone so I can't comment on it. But if you look at its features on the voip supply website, I'm sure it would all be covered.

Good luck

Let's see here. You do not use trixbox Pro so how can you speak about the reliability of the Fonality servers? You really shouldn't comment on something you can't backup with facts. Trying to bash on our products does not help anyone.

debunk- i know fonality has a pretty hard core server cluster for the PRO hosting center, and they expand it as needed, down time has been pretty slim there (better then some of my PRI providers).

If you can afford it (its cheap if you dont need Q's), I would go with PRO - especially if you are not linux/asterisk/telco savvy - otherwise prepare to spend about a month or 2 or 3 solid, day+night learning how to work with CE, linux, asterisk, and telcos - if you already have experience in most of these areas, your learning curve shouldnt be bad.

Dont get me wrong, CE isnt extremely difficult to work with, but its not fool-proof ;)

PRO on the other hand comes a hardened, locked down code source, and they have made a really stream-lined interface for it that offers you a lot of options, but in a very structured and organized manner. CE offers you 50 cagillion options all over the place (which is sometimes nice, and sometimes daunting).

One nice thing PRO can offer over CE at the moment is the capability to use your cell (or any other line) as a kind of offsite extension - if a call forwards to your cell, you still have access to all the pbx features like transfering, hold, park - etc. On CE if a call forwards to your cell, you can choose to accept or deny the call, but cant do things like transfer/hold.

The internet going down WILL NOT effect your call capability AT ALL - this is a common misconception, it will only stop you from making any configuration changes, once the net comes back online any changes you made will be pushed live.

So long story short -

got that right James - I think I bought easily $1500-2k in hardware (not even considering a server) when i first learned asterisk - 95% of that was hardware that either went in the trash or was given away to others (it was junk).

5. Yes, you have have different dial prefixes for different trunks

FAX - Pro will not detect an inbound fax and redirect it to an extension. In my opinion you shouldn't do this with CE either. I NEVER run faxes through the phone system as it cuts down on reliability.

Thanks for info

I am trying to prevent myself needing to get a dedicated second line just for the 10 faxes i send a month.

happy to use an online fax to email service for faxes i receive but would rather send faxes via a machine as it is sometimes annoying having to send a fax "digitally".

i guess i could just split the fxo line, half going to pbx, half going to fax and as long as i change settings on fax to never pickup automatically i guess it wouldnt annoy the pbx...