I'd recommend against the CTP exam, I haven't found _any_ meaningful documentation there.
There seems to be a pretty good community growing up around Asterisk, and obviously freeware is a good place to get your hands in for minimal $$. You could do worse than "Asterisk: The Future of Telephony" published by O'Reilly.
I also really liked Cisco's CIPT course, although that's not cheap, you do get your hands on Enterprise-class hardware.
You could also sign up for a mostly-free IPT service like The Gizmo Project, which you can even get working with SIP phones (my favorite is the Cisco/Linksys SPA-941)
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I'd recommend against the CTP exam, I haven't found _any_ meaningful documentation there.
There seems to be a pretty good community growing up around Asterisk, and obviously freeware is a good place to get your hands in for minimal $$. You could do worse than "Asterisk: The Future of Telephony" published by O'Reilly.
I also really liked Cisco's CIPT course, although that's not cheap, you do get your hands on Enterprise-class hardware.
You could also sign up for a mostly-free IPT service like The Gizmo Project, which you can even get working with SIP phones (my favorite is the Cisco/Linksys SPA-941)