>> Has somebody experiences with the Grandstream GXP2020 / 2000 phones in >> a business graded installation (with really traffic on .... not 3 >> calls a day ;-) ) Of course with Asterisk PBX (1.4.1 or 1.4.11 or 1.4
I have an installation right now in a real estate/mortgage company office with 36 GXP2000 phones. Average call volume is currently only about 150-200 calls per day but the number is climbing rapidly as they add more agents/loan officers. The latest firmware (Beta: 1.1.4.22) is a huge improvement over 1.1.1.14 though 1.1.1.14 is the current "release" firmware. Sadly some of the firmware loads we've tested have been horrible! The speaker phone is greatly improved. Call forwarding was an issue for several loads if using Asterisk 1.4 or later. Seems the SIP 302 message coming from the phone was corrupted. I had to hack chan_sip.c as a work around because this was a feature the had worked using 1.2 and was promised with the new system. Version 1.1.4.18 finally fixed that issue so the hack isn't necessary any more. The biggest complaint I have is the method of creating a config files for the phones. Unlike a Polycom which allows you to configure the phone using an XML file, the GXP requires you to create a text file with the configuration settings and then compile that file with their software. Additionally, if you perform a factory reset on the phone, it tries to connect to fm.grandstream.com/gs to update it's firmware load. So we are forced to run a caching name server with that address pointing to our own local server. (Don't even bother trying to tell me that all I have to do is change it in the web interface. After a factory reset, or a nice ESD zap which seems to nearly always result in a factory reset, the default address is back.) We have approached the configuration issue several different ways. The current method is using a MySQL database. We built the database and then modified the HTML from the phones web configuration to use it to update the database. We use a cron to monitor the last update time and generate a new set of config files once the database has been updated. If you only have a small installation or very little turnover, our previous method of using a text file for the database and a perl script to update the files is probably sufficient. While I haven't gotten any complaints about the cheap toy like feel, I think this is mostly due to lack of experience on the part of my users. With the GXP being the only VoIP phone they have used, they do not have a basis for comparison. The original quote offered Polycom, Aastra, Snom, and Linksys phones. The GXP was chosen strictly by price since the price difference saved them over $1000. I now demonstrate the phones on a portable system to allow the customer to see and feel the difference in the phones. I have also increased the price of the GXP phones I sell. Between these two measures I don't sell as many GXP phones. I feel the increase in price was justified based on the additional work I've had in using the GXP phones. Since the bugs are mostly worked out now, these should be more profitable for me in the future. John _______________________________________________ Sign up now for AstriCon 2007! September 25-28th. http://www.astricon.net/ --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