[asterisk-users] Snom 300 vs Grandstream gxp

[Daniel Hazelbaker]

On Jan 16, 2009, at 7:52 AM, Julian Lyndon-Smith wrote:

> Can anyone who has used both comment on the pros and cons ? Need to  
> buy
> about 30 of these, for a small company with limited IT support.

We recently deployed 85 phones to our office.  We tested the  
Grandstream GXP2000, GXP2020, Linksys SPA941, Snom 300 & 320, and a  
Polycom 430 (I think that was the series).  As an IT department we  
expected everybody to prefer the Grandstream because it is simple to  
use.  We figured everybody would have the Snom because it is complex  
to use (though super easy on the IT side to administer).  We had the  
opposite result.  Everybody hated the Grandstream because they sounded  
bad, felt clunky, were difficult to do simple things on (like park a  
call, can't do it with one button).  Nobody really cared for either  
the Linksys or Polycom.  They were just too limited.

We ended up rolling out a mixture of the Snom 300 and 320s and  
couldn't be happier (We looked at the 360, but it really doesn't offer  
anything except a bigger display, which isn't really utilized).  With  
a simple MySQL database and a few PHP scripts all we had to do was  
type the MAC address of the phone into the MySQL database (with the  
login information) and then plug the phones in.  No setup on the  
phone.  Phone automatically upgrades the firmware to whatever version  
we currently use, gets its settings from the server, etc.  If a phone  
has trouble (out of the 85 we had 2 that were a bit finicky and got  
replaced), we go into the database and change the MAC address and then  
plug in the new phone.  Again, no setup.

If you go Snom I would be happy to share these scripts, I just haven't  
gotten around to building up a nice package and posting them.  If your  
choices are either Snom or Grandstream, I would so go Snom.  I spent 2  
days trying to configure the GXP's to do the few simple things we  
wanted and couldn't pull it off (call parking, BLF & one-touch dial  
[does not fully work], etc).  I spent 30 minutes on the Snom an had it  
perfectly configured.

>> Julian


Daniel