[Asterisk-Users] 3Com Phones

[Daniel Hazelbaker]

Drat, because the 3Com phones looked pretty good for the price. :)   
Is there somewhere that has a compatibility list for Asterisk with  
all the phones that are known to work/not work with Asterisk; since  
apparently VoIP phone companies incorrectly state that they support  
the SIP protocol (I don't consider, "we support SIP as long as it  
only talks to our server because we tweaked it just a bit" to be  
"supported").

I am looking for a good 60 phones.  We are upgrading our entire phone  
system (and *old* NEC PBX).  We don't need anything fancy on most of  
the phones, just the "usual" mid-size business features.  
Speakerphone, Hold, Park, Transfer, Voicemail; and we need at least 2  
attendant stations that can see all in-use phone lines.  We are  
trying to keep the costs (relatively) down, hence using Asterisk  
instead of a full commercial solution.  It is very disconcerting to  
know the providers are essentially lying about what their phones  
support. (3Com states their phones are SIP compatible, not 3Com's  
version of SIP compatibile).

Thanks for the info, hopefully somebody will have some  
recommendations for a good phone brand that actually IS Asterisk  
compatible.

Daniel

On Mar 26, 2006, at 12:01 AM, Jared Valentine wrote:

> I would not recommend the 3Com phones for use with Asterisk.
>
> 3Com 3100 series phones do not support SIP with non-3Com systems.   
> They have
> a basic boot loader which must download code from a 3Com NBX or a  
> 3Com VCX
> system.  If you don't have either of these, then you won't get  
> runtime code
> on the phone, thereby making it impossible to use the thing with  
> Asterisk.
>
> I've heard rumors that the 3103 phones have enough storage space on  
> the
> phone to store a SIP image, but I don't have any more information  
> than that.
>
>
> As far as 3Com licensing is concerned, it's not per year, it's per- 
> seat
> (one-time charge), just like any other commercial VoIP PBX vendor  
> (Cisco,
> Avaya, Shoretel, etc.)
>
> Jared Valentine
> hidden at xmission.com