[asterisk-users] My Phone Review- Large Scale Corp Deployment.

[Matthew Mackes (Webmail)]

I have had the opportunity to test many IP phones in the last 6 months 
and I thought you might enjoy a quick review of what I have found.



Grandstream Budgtone 200 - Poor Quality for business use- Looks good, 
and the handset feels nice, buttons have a decent feel, but the disply 
is difficult to read when you are not directly over head of the phone, 
plus the sound quality of the handset, and speaker phone is very poor--- 
Its has a cave, tunnel sound.

Cisco 7960-   Great Units, Sound Great, Look Great, very professional. 
They are abit more difficult to program then others. You must find the 
SIP firmware, and be very familiar with TFTP to deploy these phones- 
However once you get a hand of them, they are a rock.

Zulty WIP 2-   THESE PHONES ARE AWESOME!!! AWESOME!!! WiFi SIP phones- 
They look like an early 90's wireless phone, but they are VERY well 
built, and work extremely well- If you are looking for a serious WIFI 
SIP phone, this is the unit for you. Trust me, I tested 3 of the other 
popular WIFI sip phones, and they are cheaply made- even the Linksys- 
other WiFI phones are built like cheap plastic cell phones.
We have purchaced over 125 Zulty WIP 2's and they are great. A company 
named Neobits has them for sale.

And the best hard phone- The Aastra 480i.
This phone  is a class act. I would even pick this over a Cisco 7960. It 
has many features, feels great, has a very cool look, and the sound 
quality is OUTSTANDING. They have great documentation, and can do more 
then the Cisco, like Busy Lamp, which is very important in a large corp 
environment when you have receptionists.

We have chosen to go with 350 Aastra 480i, 125 Zulty WIP2, and Asterisk 
to replace our 15 year old monster Meridian Nortel switch and phones.

Asterisk will be  running on Pound Key Linux, on three HP Servers- All 
DualCore Xeons, Dual Processor machines, (so four cores per machine) 
with 4 GB of RAM per. We will also be connecting the machines with Gbit 
Ethernet to one another on a private Switch, separated from the rest of 
the  LAN/WAN.


We will be handling Voice PRI's and 2 T1s for outbound PSTN, and long 
distance, and I have planned for about 100 extensions to be active at 
any one time (1/3)

If anyone would like to discuss large scale deployments- I would love to 
hear your thoughts.

Thanks Everyone,

Matt Mackes
matthewmackes at deltasoniccarwash.com