[Asterisk-Users] Re: 26. RE: Stay away from Grandstream! (Bjorn Asmul)

[Joe McConnaughey]

The Grandstream certainly has issues, but it seems most of the SIP phones 
do.  I continue to have excellent results with the Aastra 9133i.  The latest 
firmware (1.3) supports busy lamps with Asterisk 1.2.x.  I think that dollar 
for dollar, it is a fine phone and works better than most.  Again, YMMV but 
its a good phone for my office needs.



>  26. RE: Stay away from Grandstream! (Bjorn Asmul)

> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 26
> Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2005 10:49:16 -0500
> From: "Bjorn Asmul" <bjorn at atlasvoice.com>
> Subject: RE: [Asterisk-Users] Stay away from Grandstream!
> To: "Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion"
> <asterisk-users at lists.digium.com>
> Message-ID: <D5CD9643CAC15B40AF96AFB4A619B42E0424B6 at dokka.asmul.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Having tried EVERY single product from Grandstream, I don't think it's
> fair to judge Grandstream the way people do.
>
> I'm very happy with Grandstream products.
> As long as you upgrade the firmware they work fine.
> In fact they sometimes handle NAT better than any other device that I've
> tried (including ALL Sipura products).
>
> Grandstream is also one of very few to support ILBC codec, and
> BLF-support for Asterisk.
>
> If someone has tried the same, please comment.
>
> Bjorn
>
>-----Original Message-----
> From: asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com
> [mailto:asterisk-users-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of Nir
> Simionovich
> Sent: Wednesday, December 28, 2005 4:28 PM
> To: Asterisk Users Mailing List - Non-Commercial Discussion
> Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Stay away from Grandstream!
>
> I agree, GrandStream does seem to become the poor man's VoIP solution -
> making the bar for other VoIP phones very low to pass.
> I believe that GrandStream have a very good chance to basically being
> bought by a bigger company, like what happened to Sipura. What would
> happen then would be that people would say: "Oh, GrandStream, Very good
> - after all XXXX bought them".
>
> I found that sometimes the most surprising hardware comes from non-known
> companies, like PerfecTone or Micronet. I think the main thing is the
> try things out, and find out what is the best suited IPhone for you.
>
> Nir S
>
> Steve Underwood wrote:
>> 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.
>>>>