[Asterisk-Users] Re: ip phone

[Walt Reed]

On Fri, Nov 18, 2005 at 09:00:20AM -0400, Doug Meredith said:
> stevanus <step-one-too at bdg.centrin.net.id> wrote:
> 
> >Maybe grandstream budgetone 100 series will fulfill your requirement.
> >It's very good for such a cheap sub-50 phone.
> 
> We have two of these and they are the VoIP equivalent of a $10 K-Mart
> phone.  I won't even use them in my house, much less the office.

Yep - I have one in my "junk" box. Maybe the SPA-841 would be a better
choice for a few dollars more (haven't played with one personally, but
everything I've heard says that they are much better than the GS BT's.)

I'm not a fan of analog phones. Except for lobby, kitchen, or conference
room phones, anything less than 2 line appearances is a PITA in the
business world. A single line phone (even with *) makes it difficult to
(for example) put someone on hold, call someone else to ask a question,
and then return to the primary call. This means that each analog phone
would need 2 ports off a channel bank.

New pricing for a channel bank (ADIT 600) runs about $3300 for 48 FXS
ports
(I don't know why people keep quoting ebay prices... Let's be real
here. If you can find them new for less, please let us all know where.)

2 48 port boxes with a 4 port Digium echo canceller quad T1 card will
run you around $88 per port PLUS the cost of the phone - and a good
analog phone is going to be a minimum of $50 for a single line version,
$89 for a two line. This puts us at $138 for a single line and a
whopping $265 for a 2 line phone by going analog.

When  you can get a Polycom 501 for $199 qty 1, it obviously doesn't
make sense to use 2 line analog phones at all.

With the 301 at $130 (froogle shows as low as $106), it doesn't seem to
make much sense to use analog phones at all. There are Many sub $100 IP
phones that are pretty good as well, which tosses out the reason to even
maintain existing analog phones. The 301 has an ethernet switch, so
chances are you don't have to rewire at all (so that argument is moot in
most cases.)

There are a few cases where analog phones may still make sense - door
phones, conference phones (if you have an existing good polycom), etc.
All in all, going analog seems like a pretty silly thing to do when you
look even just a couple years down the road.