[Asterisk-Users] What business IP phone to use

[Conrad Wood]

> 1) Budgetones: Don't bother for a business setting.  The speaker phone
> is basically useless (echo problems) and the handset is horrible.  If
> you follow the suggestion on the Wiki to drill out the handset, it
> improves things marginally, but not much.  Users talking to you will
> constantly complain about you sound muffled.  It's think it's a
> frequency response thing and not a volume thing, I think it's just
> getting lower than a standard 8 khz sample out of the microphone,
> because it's so cheap. 

I wouldn't dismiss the budgetones so easily.
We use about 20 budgetones 100/101. We exclusively use firmware 1.0.6.7.
All the phones are provisioned centrally via tftp which works really
well (almost plug and play, except I got to type in the MAC of a new
phone into my script and run the script).
I cannot recall a single time a phone 'crashed','froze' or didn't
register properly. We tried snom 320 and a telappliant phone[1]. We sent
the telappliant phone straight back to the supplier because it was so
horrible. We still use the snom for our receptionist, but our users
actually prefer the budgetones. Personally I really like the snom 320,
but not all users find phones as exciting as me ;-)
We have no issues with echo nor complaints about the voice quality. When
we introduced the phones (coming from BT analogue phones) users actually
commented on the improved clarity of speech. 
None of the phones broke (and they do get mistreated ;) ) since we
started using them, which is about 2 years ago.
Here in UK the phone cost less than £50, considerably less if you buy 
30+.
Of course it's not the right phone for receptionists or
phone-power-users or people who rely on a speakerphone, but it's
simplicity seems to appeal to some users.
Heck, for that price it's worth buying one as a demonstration unit.

The headset jack on the back is also a nice feature: If you don't like
the headset you can simply plug your earphones in.

It might be worth mentioning that we disabled most of the 'features' on
the phone itself, like call waiting, transfer etc and instead are
handled by asterisk which might explain why our phones don't crash ;-)

conrad


[1] http://www.voiptalk.org/products/Telappliant+IP2006+SIP+Phone