I believe I posted about my Asterisk system planning 4 or 5 years ago. In short, we had an aging Nortel Norstar system that needed replacement. I decided to take on the task myself and took some Asterisk and Trixbox training. Amazingly, the system I built as a total newb is still running today. However, some changes had to be made since then as our business grew with branch offices.

At this time, we have a Verizon T1 PRI which has been absolutely terrible. I know it's not reasonable to expect 100% uptime, but Verizon's response time to trouble tickets is unforgivable. They're perfectly happy to let us flounder for hours before scheduling a truck roll. To top it off, their CSRs are the most rude bunch of unhappy pricks I could imagine. Our Verizon sales reps are of no help. They don't even respond to me unless I'm interested in buying something or upgrading.

Needless to say, I want to stick it to Verizon. I could easily transition to SIP trunking from our cable TV operator. We would save some money based on our current usage, and it would be seamless since it's literally just a configuration adjustment in Asterisk. The uptime on our $70/month cable modem has been far better than our Verizon T1, so I'm not worried about Cablevision possibly being a worse choice.

But, since I'm going to be making a change anyway, maybe it's time to switch directions completely. Some of these hosted PBX solutions are looking pretty good. Of the few I've looked into, OnSIP is looking the best. Things I like are the multiple SIP registrations per extension, published SIP credentials, bring your own phone/device, and the my.OnSIP user control panel looks like a functional equivalent to FOP2 which we run now. The biggest downside is lack of blacklist. I have over 750 numbers of scammers and phone spammers in our Asterisk blacklist and I don't want to give it up. I contacted OnSIP about this and they don't have any plans to enable this as a feature.

So, is anyone aware of another company with a similar feature set that also allows blacklisting?

I don't know about blacklisting, but at work we transitioned from our own asterisk box to OnSIP about a year ago, and have no complaints. We finally made the move when our asterisk box got hacked with a dictionary attack and made $20k worth of phone calls in a month.

I neglected to mention it, but this is another factor in my desire to get out of the PBX admin game. Russian and Chinese IPs are hitting the box daily. I've implemented fail2ban, but it's a cat and mouse game I don't want any part of.

Do you happen to know if you're able to handle inbound calls differently based on caller id? There are only a few numbers that plague us on a weekly basis. The vast majority of anonymous Skype calls (0000123456) are garbage. The way I handle it now is I send them to a custom greeting that dumps right into voicemail. We can ring them back if the calling party is legit.