New to Asterisk and I have a stupid question about Spa112

Hi

I have installed Asterisk on Deb Wheezy. I managed to make a sample sip setup that works locally fine (initiate calls between couple clients internally). Hopefully I will manage to get it working as a sip server in the end.

My plan is to get a Voip plan and get Cisco Spa112 to use with it. However it seems like Spa112 can handle Voip calls by itself. Call me stupid since I am just starting up with Asterisk world, but how can I use Spa112 and Asterisk together?. In other words what benefits will I get from using Spa112 as an extension to Asterisk and what is the flow of the setup?

My original intention of installing Asterisk is to use it for sip voice chat with my friends using Jitsi, ekiga etc type of clients. But I saw that people were using similar setups. I am just rather curious, well also freshly ignorant in the sense that I do not know lots of the concepts behind voip , warming up.

I am setting all this up for my one man shop, so I doubt that I will need anything fancy stuff.

thanks

Spa112 basically enables you to connect two analog phones to your Asterisk VoIP PBX. The device is basically a gateway that transforms analog telephony to VoIP.

As far as configuration for Asterisk goes - you have a bunch of examples already online, just browse the numerous tutorials.