For about a decade, Gaige and I have run Astlinux as our preferred phone system, with upstream VoIP service from voip.ms, who asr told us about back in 2008 when they were his customer.

Fast forward to the past month. My mother-in-law just had a house built in Virginia and wanted to hang onto her Maine number. No problem, opened another voip.ms account for her and bought a Cisco SPA112 (a comparatively modern ATA available for under $35 on Amazon) so she could continue using her DECT cordless phones.

Come to discover as part of playing around with that account, that voip.ms has grown up a lot since the last time we looked at it. Voicemail, IVRs, ring groups, hunt groups... pretty much the only feature that we had on Asterisk that we didn't get on voip.ms was a conference bridge, but the ship has sailed on that since free or super inexpensive conference bridges are plentiful these days and besides we use Zoom for most stuff anyway.

Gaige and I migrated our stuff in rapid succession, and all of our desktop phones (a mix of Cisco and Polycom) are talking directly to subaccounts on voip.ms. Last night I went to Equinix to disconnect and remove the Alix 2c3 boxes that have served us well in this role for years.

Bye bye Asterisk! I won't miss your funky configuration file format.