> 1) Budgetones: Don't bother for a business setting. The speaker phone > is basically useless (echo problems) and the handset is horrible. If > you follow the suggestion on the Wiki to drill out the handset, it > improves things marginally, but not much. Users talking to you will > constantly complain about you sound muffled. It's think it's a > frequency response thing and not a volume thing, I think it's just > getting lower than a standard 8 khz sample out of the microphone, > because it's so cheap.
I wouldn't dismiss the budgetones so easily. We use about 20 budgetones 100/101. We exclusively use firmware 1.0.6.7. All the phones are provisioned centrally via tftp which works really well (almost plug and play, except I got to type in the MAC of a new phone into my script and run the script). I cannot recall a single time a phone 'crashed','froze' or didn't register properly. We tried snom 320 and a telappliant phone[1]. We sent the telappliant phone straight back to the supplier because it was so horrible. We still use the snom for our receptionist, but our users actually prefer the budgetones. Personally I really like the snom 320, but not all users find phones as exciting as me ;-) We have no issues with echo nor complaints about the voice quality. When we introduced the phones (coming from BT analogue phones) users actually commented on the improved clarity of speech. None of the phones broke (and they do get mistreated ;) ) since we started using them, which is about 2 years ago. Here in UK the phone cost less than £50, considerably less if you buy 30+. Of course it's not the right phone for receptionists or phone-power-users or people who rely on a speakerphone, but it's simplicity seems to appeal to some users. Heck, for that price it's worth buying one as a demonstration unit. The headset jack on the back is also a nice feature: If you don't like the headset you can simply plug your earphones in. It might be worth mentioning that we disabled most of the 'features' on the phone itself, like call waiting, transfer etc and instead are handled by asterisk which might explain why our phones don't crash ;-) conrad [1] http://www.voiptalk.org/products/Telappliant+IP2006+SIP+Phone _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation provided by Easynews.com -- Asterisk-Users mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
