asterisk users - Mar 2008 - Anyone used Siemens SIP/Dect phones?

Hi all,

I am close to purchasing some new DECT phones for our home office here 
in the UK.

We use Asterisk and I am sorely tempted by the Siemens C475IP or the 
"soon-to-become-available-in-the-uk" S685IP.

Both systems have great feature sets and, on-paper at least, look to be 
the bee's knees.

Anyone got any skeletons on them?

Thanks

Alan
-- 
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On Sat, 22 Mar 2008, Alan Lord wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am close to purchasing some new DECT phones for our home office here
> in the UK.
>
> We use Asterisk and I am sorely tempted by the Siemens C475IP or the
> "soon-to-become-available-in-the-uk" S685IP.
>
> Both systems have great feature sets and, on-paper at least, look to be
> the bee's knees.
>
> Anyone got any skeletons on them?
I've deployed a number of Siemens C460IP's.

They're really good and coverage is excellent, but for one thing: They 
base stations lose registration with the asterisk box after some time and 
need rebooting. I've read that this affects the S450's too, but I've
no
1st hand experience of them. I've emailled Siemens and posted on one of 
their forums where others have experienced the same issues, but have 
nothing back at all. I could live with the, if they had a remote reboot 
facility, but they don't seem to.

I'd look at the Snom M3's but they're more expensive that my
customers
will pay )-: And had a report of them being unstable too )-:

So for the time being I'm sticking to ATA's and cheap analogue DECT
phones
for those customers who want them.

Gordon

On Sat, Mar 22, 2008 at 09:08:43AM +0000, Alan Lord
wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am close to purchasing some new DECT phones for our home office here 
> in the UK.
> 
> We use Asterisk and I am sorely tempted by the Siemens C475IP or the 
> "soon-to-become-available-in-the-uk" S685IP.
Have been using the C460IP phones and they seem to work okay, the range on 
them is excellent. I haven't had any problems with the base de-registering 
from asterisk though. (maybe a NAT timeout issue?) They are very simple to 
configure.

Limitations:

- No SIP call transfer feature (that I can find)
- Doesn't have any remote provisioning features (yet)
- Doesn't have any ability to forward calls from the analog side
   <-> SIP side, which is a shame as that would be handy.
- Base station supports multiple phones, but you can only register each 
  handset with one base station. So if you have multiple base stations, you 
  can't take advantage of that feature (i.e, allow the same handset to be 
  used in multiple locations. Other DECT handsets that support multiple 
  bases are available though.)
- I find it a bit quiet on the sound quality, sometimes a problem with 
  background noise.
- No VoIP message waiting indicator

Maybe some or all of these are addressed in the C475IP?



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Robert Lister     - London Internet Exchange - http://www.linx.net/
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