[Asterisk-Users] Stay away from Grandstream!

[Steve Underwood]

I think the unfairness stems from Grandstreams generally being people's 
first IP phone - it seems like a cheap entry point to try things out. 
They then falsely assume everything else has to be better, especially if 
it has a higher price tag. Wrong. The standard for VoIP phones is total 
crap. Anything rising even slightly above that level wins awards for 
excellence. :-)

Steve

Nir Simionovich wrote:

> 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.
>>