i agree Modems are no good so don't waste ur time there go for proper switch it is expensive but worth it ;) and go for telephoney deveoplers they are not CHEAP ! Live as if your were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Mahatma Gandhi

I think these companies have significant capital and deals with phone companies to do this sort of thing. Unless you have a lot of money and/or want to make a real business venture out of it, I don't think it's probably the best sort of project to work on for purely educational purposes. NATHAN RIDLEY Web Application Developer generalgherkin@yahoo.com

The way that efax (probably) does it is that it has bought a pool of phone numbers that it assigns to every customer that signs up. e.g. if you live in houston's 832 area code then they may have bought up (832) 555-xxxx to (832) 565-xxxx number pool. That's enough to handle 11000 customers from Houston alone. It can be expanded as needed. Ofcourse you may not have the resources (or time) to buy this many telephone numbers so your project might have to take a different approach.