[Asterisk-Users] Stay away from Grandstream!

[Nir Simionovich]

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.
>>
>> cYa,
>> Avi
>>
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