[ILUG] Views on IP phones

[Chris Higgins]

On Mon, 25 Jul 2005 09:18:06 +0100
Niall O Broin <niall at linux.ie> wrote:

> Well, the Asterisk project has managed to move a little higher up the 
> list, with my test server at home now working (for limited values of 
> working - but the rest is just :-)  asterisk configuration).

> have heard  mixed views about them. I'm interested in hearing from
> anyone who has  used any of the available phones with their opinions
> of them.
> 
> I am of course only interested in phones which work with Asterisk, but
> I imagine pretty much all VOIP phones will do that.

Don't risk buying one unless you check first.. and some of the
phones that ship have SIP firmware on them that doesn't work
with * for me.

There are a lot of phones coming out of China now that are being
rebranded under a lot of different names ( but are all really the same
phone )

If you end up with the PA168x series chipsets, then you may be able
find an IAX2 firmware for the phone that you can use instead of SIP
for direct connections to *

We have a couple of the Siptronic ST-150's (siptronic.com )
that we use in the office here, and the phones themselves are fine. 

Siptronic ship an older version of the firmware ( v1.42 ) than you
can get from the home site of the manufacturer ( www.aredfox.com )
but as it's all the same chipset - firmware sources don't seem to matter much.

In terms of the phones themselves - the cord from phone to handset
is a little shorter than we're used to - but that should extend with use.
There are loads of extra buttons on the phones, but most of them have
little to do with making calls ( you get a whole button to read out
your configured IP address, and another one for your server IP address )
which seems like a waste of buttons.

SIP phones tend to try do lots of stuff on the phone, whereas a traditional
phone tends to do stuff at the PBX level - so you'll end up with things
like - hold music configured on the * server, but the hold button on the
phone does a local hold of the call.

There are IAX2 firmware releases available for the PA168x chipset phones
so we have some phones configured as SIP and some as IAX2.. the only
noticable difference is MWI notification works for SIP but not for IAX2

If you are after the siptronic phones, then you can get them direct from
siptronic via Ebay - they go for about EUR 80 (plus p&p ), ship from germany
arrive without delay.

A good place to go phone info hunting is http://www.voip-info.org

> 
> 
> Niall
> 
> -- 
> Irish Linux Users' Group
> http://www.linux.ie/mailman/listinfo/ilug/
> 


-- 
Chris Higgins
Darach Technology Ltd                      tel: +353-1-6204370
email: chris.higgins at darach.ie          fax: +353-1-6204371
http://www.darach.ie