[Asterisk-Users] Stay away from Grandstream!

[Nir Simionovich]

I agree, GrandStream does seem to become the poor man's VoIP solution - 
making the bar for other VoIP phones very low to pass.
I believe that GrandStream have a very good chance to basically being 
bought by a bigger company, like what happened to Sipura. What
would happen then would be that people would say: "Oh, GrandStream, Very 
good - after all XXXX bought them".

I found that sometimes the most surprising hardware comes from non-known 
companies, like PerfecTone or Micronet. I think the main
thing is the try things out, and find out what is the best suited IPhone 
for you.

Nir S

Steve Underwood wrote:
> I think the unfairness stems from Grandstreams generally being 
> people's first IP phone - it seems like a cheap entry point to try 
> things out. They then falsely assume everything else has to be better, 
> especially if it has a higher price tag. Wrong. The standard for VoIP 
> phones is total crap. Anything rising even slightly above that level 
> wins awards for excellence. :-)
>
> Steve
>
> Nir Simionovich wrote:
>
>> Hmmm...
>>
>> I feel that this is a little unfair towards GrandStream and other 
>> like vendors. Any vendor on the market has issues with their 
>> firmware, I can list many:
>>
>> Sipura/LinkSys SPA 841 (Latest firmware):
>> 1. Phone doesn't re-register upon network loss
>> 2. Phone firware becomes stalled, without any indication of an error 
>> while all functions continue working
>> 3. Transfer function doesn't work as it should
>> 4. MWI doesn't always work correctly
>> 5. I can really go on and on...
>>
>> WellTech (Latest firmware):
>> 1. Support for g729 is buggy
>> 2. Echo cancel is buggy and causes ATA to crash
>> 3. IP phones have no ability to re-configure the function keys on the 
>> box
>> 4. Transfer/Conference buttons don't do anytning
>>
>> I can go on and on with other vendors, including Cisco, Nortel and 
>> more. The thing I'm saying is that any phone you'd test would run 
>> into issues at some
>> time or other - claiming to stay away from one or another causes you 
>> to not even consider alternatives, thus at the end, you reach the 
>> Microsoft way of
>> thinking.
>>
>> Last week, I got a phone to test with called a MicroNet. Actually, I 
>> got 3 phones, all from Micronet. I started them up, found out that 2 
>> of them were
>> actually WellTech phones (well, the shape told me, I hoped the 
>> firmware will be different, but I found out wrong). The third phone 
>> was different. It's called
>> a Micronet SP5106 which to my surprise, worked almost flawlessly out 
>> of the box. It took me a while to configure the network correctly, 
>> and to understand
>> the logic of the menu, but after that, the rest was easy. Transfer, 
>> 3-Way conference, Forward, DND, VoiceMail button, everything worked. 
>> What didn't
>> work was configurable from the web backend - in other words: I 
>> couldn't find a flaw (yet). The only flaw I did find was this: the 
>> phone has the ability to
>> connect to 3 SIP accounts at the same time. Upon defining a new 
>> account, you need to physically RESET the phone, other than that, the 
>> phone works
>> just fine.
>>
>> I'll be posting a full review on my blog at http://www.net-gurus.net
>>
>> Regards,
>>  Nir S
>>
>> Vahan Yerkanian wrote:
>>
>>> Stay away from Grandstream and AddPac. These are some of the 
>>> companies with undereducated software developers that have problems 
>>> with understanding written english, mainly the SIP RFC documents. I 
>>> learned this the hard way, wasting half a year with helping them fix 
>>> problems which shouldn't be there if they have had read/implemented 
>>> the RFC correctly.
>>>
>>> Basically, they sell beta quality hardware and then you co-share 
>>> their final firmware development costs by providing free testing/QA. 
>>> I blame their sales management for pushing developers to release 
>>> without proper testing.
>>>
>>> GXP2000 is much more buggy echo-can wise than the earlier models.
>>>
>>> For now, I'm back to more expensive equipment. We're not that rich 
>>> to pay twice.
>>>
>>> HTH,
>>> Vahan
>>>
>>>
>>> Avi Miller wrote:
>>>
>>>> Brian Capouch wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> They don't perform as well as the expensive Ciscos and Polycoms, 
>>>>> but many of us are using them in a variety of circumstances quite 
>>>>> happily.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I have 4 of them in a small office (GXP2000) running 1.0.12 and 
>>>> they're just fine for our purposes. As Brian said, YMMV. For our 
>>>> 60-person office in Sydney, I'm probably going to use a mix of 
>>>> Polycom/Grandstream and softphones.
>>>
>
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