Thursday, October 28, 2010

How to choose a good IP phone

I was thinking about a review of different IP phones and was coming back to the fact that Polycom probably makes the best business IP phones. While we are selling a range of phones, we found Plycom to be the best. However I couldn't justify writing a review of different phones when all I am talking about is benefits of Plycom phones, until I discovered the following review:

How to Choose a Quality IP Phone for Your Business

Basically under the pretenses of giving an overview of different phones the author is talking about how good Polycom phones are. I must admit I agree with the assessment in that article and will not repeat the material here.

We offer a range of Polycom phones that can be found here.

However, to give a balanced view, I must highlight the weaknesses of Polycom phones and also the benefits of some other phones.

Let me start with the main weakness of Polycom phones. The main weakness of the Polycom is lack of support for STUN. STUN is the most commonly used method of deploying SIP phones in remote locations. Here is a more technical explanation of what STUN is:

STUN overview on voip-info

So when we need STUN we use other phones.

Thomson ST2030 is a great all-around phone that offers top features like BLF fields at an entry - level phone price.

Same with the Grandstream range of phones - if you need more features at a lower cost, which I must admit not all of our customers do.

2 comments:

  1. The Polycoms are very well built phones and great for enterprise and call center deployments. We have deployed thousands of them and very few come back for service, many have survived years and years of hard, call center service without issue. And their conference phones are second to none. Also HD Voice is absolutely stunning. Really, it's better than you think. When you've experienced it you will understand what I'm saying.

    However they have some limitations - as you mentioned, the lack of STUN and VPN capabilities limit their usefulness outside the corporate network.

    I have no experience with Thomson products but I've used some Grandstream stuff - feature rich but a bit "consumer grade" compared to offerings from Cisco, Polycom et al.

    My 2c :)

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  2. Well said, Dan. We have the same experience although some of the latest Grandstream phones have improved.

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