[Asterisk-Users] VOIP phonesets vs. cheap Analog touch-tone sets with Asterisk

[Leif Madsen]

Steve Murphy wrote:
> Hello--
> 
> I've been asked an interesting question, and I'm too ignorant to answer
> it authoritatively (yet). Can anyone help me?
> 
> Question: If I'm going to implement a somewhat small (10-80) phone
> system, and I have a choice of using VOIP phoneset (like SNOM or
> Grandstream or Cisco, etc), vs. cheap analog touch-tone phones, exactly
> what features will I kiss goodbye if I use the cheap analogs?

Some people swear by their SIP phones.  I however do not have the luxury 
of being able to purchase any right now, but I do have a TDM400P with a 
fairly nice NT Vista 150 telephone plugged into it, and I have had 
complements on the quality of the sound.

I can't directly answer your question about which features the SIP 
phones will give you, but that should all be easily found with a little 
googling about the various phones.

Honestly, I haven't missed using an analog handset at all, but then 
again, I'm a single entity in a home/test environment, and not one of 50 
people in a work environment, so YMMV.  I'd suggest getting a list of 
features you NEED to have, and then see if you can get away with the 
cheap phones.  The other thing you are going to have to consider is 
using a couple of channel banks and a TE410 since you are using perhaps 
upwards of 80 phones, which you will never get with the digium FXS cards 
[you'd be looking closer to around 8-16, depending on MB, free IRQ's, 
BIOS, etc.. etc.. (from what I have read on the mailing lists anyways)]

Just my .02 CDN.

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