[VoiceOps] Grandstream VoIP phones

[Nathan Anderson]

On Friday, August 17, 2012 1:31 PM, Ryan Delgrosso <> wrote:

> I agree with polycom on the speakerphone quality front, BUT they are an
> absolute nightmare in most other aspects.

[snip]

If you haven't used it yet, a lot of your complaints have been address in UCS 4.0, *especially* the boot-up time, which is MUCH improved.  Many configuration options which previously required a reboot of the phone after being changed no longer do.  The web management interface got a complete overhaul, too, although I haven't become intimately familiar with the new one since I tend to shy away from using the web management anyway and generally stick to central provisioning.

In an office environment, you can use DHCP to set the provisioning URL of the phone so that it doesn't have to be entered in manually on the phone itself, although I understand that for hosted PBX service providers, this isn't really an option.  What we have ended up doing for telecommuters is to put the phones behind a small, cheap, L2VPN-capable router (MikroTik RB750), have the router tunnel back to the office, and L2-bridge the phone over the VPN so that it can talk to the same DHCP server as all the phones in the office do.  Kills many birds with a single stone: phone traffic is encrypted, the office phone switch doesn't need to have a publicly-routable IP assigned to it, the phones themselves aren't behind a NAT from the perspective of the office phone switch, and all phones -- local and remote -- are provisioned the same way.  Win, win, win, win.

-- 
Nathan Anderson
First Step Internet, LLC
nathana at fsr.com