[Asterisk-Users] Stay away from Grandstream!

[Bjorn Asmul]

Having tried EVERY single product from Grandstream, I don't think it's
fair to judge Grandstream the way people do.

I'm very happy with Grandstream products.
As long as you upgrade the firmware they work fine.
In fact they sometimes handle NAT better than any other device that I've
tried (including ALL Sipura products).

Grandstream is also one of very few to support ILBC codec, and
BLF-support for Asterisk.

If someone has tried the same, please comment.

Bjorn 

-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Nir
Simionovich
Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2005 4:28 PM
To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Stay away from Grandstream!

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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