[asterisk-users] DECT phone for home: siemens A510 v. Grandstream DP715

[Pete Mundy]

Hi Roy & others.

Sorry for the delayed reply to this thread. The holiday period delayed my testing of the A510 and C610 range further, but I have now had a chance to give them a little 'ear time'.

On 12/12/2012, at 5:30 PM, Co-op Vacation Rentals <coopvr at gmail.com> wrote:

> Thanks for testing these out.  You said you like the 510 vs 580.  Which one is newer?  I have the 580.  I'm staying tuned for your review of the 610.  The 580 isn't DECT compatible and only supports some of the Gigaset handsets.
> I might sell mine and upgrade depending on what you learn about it.
> 
> Can you tell me a little more about what you are testing for?
> Quality?
> Simultaneous In/Outgoing Calls using 1 or Multiple SIP accounts.
> Conference Calling?
> Any other Features?

My tests were just for basic functionality of the devices as normal run of the mill phones. I wanted to know for example, weather they had any annoying 'glitches' like the 580's insistence on telling me "You have new messages" when there is only a missed call, or other practical usage issues.

After testing the A510 and C610 my opinion is that I would go for the C610 any day. I suspect the A510 is a 'newer' release than the A580 (which seems to be EOL now), however I'm not entirely certain about that. The web GUI for the 510 and the 610 are visually very similar, but both are different to the 580. I suspect the 510/610 run a newer shared firmware which has evolved from the 580 (the 510/610 GUI gives hints of this and it looks overall far more polished than the 580).

The 510 handset is quite basic (lower-res mono with coloured backlight). The 610 handset is visually similar to the 510 (although not the same), but more glossy and has a much nicer LCD (colour, higher res). I suspect the 610's handset CPU is a little faster too.

I'm surprised to hear you say the 580 isn't DECT compatible. It's manual indicates it supports both DECT and GAP, so should be able to take handset registrations from other brand handsets (and also register the Gigaset handsets with other DECT bases, if desired). Is this not your experience?

I note that the range of other Gigaset handsets compatible with the 580 base is a reasonable list too, as shown at hte URL you provided:

> http://gigaset.com/us/en/cms/PageCustomerServicesCompatibility.html


Your link indicates that the C610H handset can be used with your A580OIP base. I reckon that would be worth giving a try because the 610 is a nice handset and if it works with your bases then it might be a good solution for additional phones.

I haven't tested this at all with the 580, but I can confirm that the A510 and C610 do happily interoperate with each other (ie, I was able to register my A510H with the C610 base and then my C610H with the A510 base). Once the second handset was registered with the base, I created a second SIP account login definition and assigned the first account to the first handset and the second account to the second handset. You can define which handsets receive incoming calls on a per SIP account basis and also define which SIP account each handset will use for outgoing calls on an individual handset basis.

The configuration options available on each model of base (510/610) appear to be identical. This is what makes me think they share a common firmware.

Both handsets do provide notification for missed calls, but thankfully they can be configured via the base-station configuration to not flash their MWI led for this condition.

What I haven't tried (due to not having any) is registering a standard DECT cordless (one that comes with a PoTS analog base) to either of the Gigaset base-stations. If that does work OK (fingers crossed), these base-stations could be a great upgrade for households with existing analog DECT cordlesses.

Anyway, to wrap up, a note on the other items you asked - I did test 2 simultaneous SIP calls on separate accounts (and also calling each other via the Asterisk server). I only tested with ulaw since that's all we use on this server. So note that I haven't tested running 2 concurrent calls using a CPU intensive codec; that would be interesting, but out of scope for what I'm looking right now. Call quality with 2 ulaw calls in progress is great, just as good as a single. I didn't give 3-way conference any decent time testing I'm afraid. I did have a shot at it following the instructions in the manual on the 610 but seemed to only be able to effect a call transfer, not a 3-way bridge. But I really didn't give that any decent time and I'm fairly sure that it was me doing something wrong there before moving on and not going back.

I have both phones here for another fortnight or so. If there is something specific you want tested then let me know and I'll see if I can oblige. Otherwise my recommendation is focus on the 610 for now - it's a nice wee phone which isn't all that much more expensive, and possibly able to be retro-fitted to your existing bases.

Anyway, hope this post helps anyone wondering about this range of phones :)

Pete



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