[Asterisk-Users] Hardware IAX phone (please read and reply!)

[Grzegorz Nosek]

Hello all!

I've talked recently to the head of R&D dept. of Telkom Telos 
(www.telos.com.pl) - a big Polish company specialised in making 
phones. I gave them the idea of creating a cheap (cost-effective) 
hardware IP phone. The phone we discussed would include hardware 
support for IAX (though probably SIP/sth. else would be required too 
if it were to hit the market.. what do you think?) and GSM 06.10. 
Although they have no previous experience in IP phones, they were 
quite interested and promised to have a deeper look into the issue. 

So now for the big part: everybody PLEASE give your suggestions about 
what the IP phone of your choice should look/work/... like. The main 
reason we started the talks was the cost of currently available 
phones (even $70+s&h is a truckload of money for a phone here in 
Poland) but any and all suggestions are welcome.

I'd also love to hear from the more hardware-oriented people - do you 
have any suggestions about used chips, controllers, codecs, whatever? 
As I said, although they've been making phones for years, they 
haven't built an IP phone before so they have to research the 
possible elements used. Why not make it easier for them? :)

With Telos being a specialised factory, there's the benefit that e.g. 
good-looking cases are no problem at all, and if low price wasn't the 
goal, touchscreens and all would be an option too - maybe 
some "deluxe" edition?

An alternative design that came up was a bigger (say, 12/24 ports) 
gateway with some embedded Linux running on an industrial PC (as 
beefy as circumstances require - any comments?) with plain RJ11 
sockets on one side and Ethernet on the other. What do you think 
about this?

Hope to hear from you (a lot! :)

 Grzegorz Nosek