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. Julian ______________________________________________________________________ This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email ______________________________________________________________________
Hi, I've never used Snom phones, but have used the Grandstreams. I think you will find that they just feel 'cheap.' We had a half dozen of them, and the functionality is there, and they work great. But they just feel rough and cheap when using them. If you are planning on using different headsets with them, you are fine. But if you are planning on using the factory headsets, you might find that the headset has rough edges, etc. Call me 'crazy'! We're using Linksys SPA-942/941's and couldn't be happier. The 941 model is a dollar or so more than the GXP, but don't have dual Ethernet. 942's do, for an extra $20. Regards, Robert Broyles 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. > > Julian > > ______________________________________________________________________ > This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System. > For more information please visit http://www.messagelabs.com/email > ______________________________________________________________________ > > _______________________________________________ > -- Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com -- > > asterisk-users mailing list > To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: > http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users > >
On Fri, 16 Jan 2009, 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.You get more phone for your money with the Grandstream, but ... You'll hear a lot of people here who've had bad results with them in the past, so will be baised against them, and there were early issues with software quality - and still some issues with newer software on holder handsets, however ... I've deployed a lot of Grandstreams - 100's. Mostly GXP2000s but one place (a small school on a tight budget) went for BT200's with a single GXP2000 for the reception and they're happy. If budget was that tight, I'd look at the GXP280's though. Audio quality in the Snoms is probably better. Build quality is a little better too - the handsets are slightly heavier. I find call transfers easier on the Grandstreams - also the display (on the GXP range) is much bigger than that Snom 300's. That's nice if you're putting up number->names. The web interface on both is easy enough if you're not auto provisioning. (I don't auto provision the grandstreams as such, but use a utility called 'gsutil' on them) However, while it's very comprehensive, I think there's too much information there! Well - that's my input... (mostly on Grandstreams though!) Gordon
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.>> JulianDaniel
On Fri, 2009-01-16 at 15:52 +0000, 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. >For evaluation a got a couple of different phones. gxp2000, cheap, but it works, some people (not me) have lots of problems with them. 4-sip-users per phone. no VLAN support. GXP-budget, even cheaper, but works, just one single sip-user per phone. snom320, bit more expensive, also works great, easy to upgrade. Latest version even got v6-support. all versions have VLAN support, 6-sip-users per phone. Easy to configure with web-interface. Siemens optipoint 410, something to avoid! (even it it were less expensive) If power/lan are plugged in wrong order, you get an instant brick, as the firmware is wiped and no possibility to get it back. I mention VLAN support, in case you don't have separate lan's it might be worthwhile if a lot of data passes through the rest of the lan.... hw