Has anyone ever heard of a company called Ascom?

All I know is that the system is a Asterisk Box and they are using Dect Handsets.

Our management team purchaced it.

Awsome system, I've installed tons of them. What do you want to know about it?

I have one in one of our long term care facilities, I may be able to answer some questions as well.

cool,

So we already have a Asterisk back-bone connecting several legacy phone systems together. I even have a wifi phone hanging on one of them. How is this system different then what I already have in place?

Also, the wifi handset we are using has a few drawbacks.

1 Battery life is very short
2 they do not switch between access points well

ascom is selling us the i62 handsets, how do they fair? also they say they are dect, but do not use a base station?

The i62 is WiFi, the d62 is the Dect version. These are very robust phones. They cost a lot more than others, but they can withstand a lot of abuse. I would say the battery life is good. Users in my case can go an entire shift without swapping batteries.

My system came with an AA50 from Digium, but if you already have an Asterisk system to hang your phones on, then you shouldn't be buying an Asterisk box with this system. I guess it doesn't hurt, but you don't need it.

I would recommend the UPAC, especially with the Dect phones. The UPAC provides features that you normally wouldn't have, such as messaging and PTT.

In my case there are issues with the analog integration that we are still working out and the AA50 has been buggy, but if you are pure SIP and you have a stable Asterisk deployment then I think it's a great system.

Just a note that you can find nearly identical phones from Aastra and Ericsson. I'm not sure who own what and who builds product for who, but they all have interchangeable products for Dect and WiFi.

OK, they said Dect, the inventory list that I have refers to 18 ascom i62 Messenger and 3 battery packs for d62. So I guess I will see when it gets here.

I do not see a AA50 OR a UPAC, what are they?

I would like them to just hook up to our current Asterisk boxes using IAX, that would be a lot easier then trying to get a new PRI out of our current PBX.

How good do they change access points? The wifi handsets that we currently have do not do it very smoothly.

If they are selling you the i62, then I don't know why Dect is being mentioned. If you aren't buying Dect APs, then the Dect phones wouldn't do you much good.

The AA50 is an Asterisk appliance from Digium, but there are other Asterisk gateways they may sell depending on what you are integrating to. The UPAC provides extra functionality for the phones. For example, if you have a conference bridge on your Asterisk box, the UPAC can add push-to-talk for your phones. It will also do firmware updates, change your hot keys, apply templates for your phones etc. Basically it provides you with additional features and management for the phones.


The Dect phones that I have used generally roam very well. Once in awhile they are a bit sticky. I don't know how the WiFi version fares with roaming, but I would suspect a lot of that is going to be dependent on your wireless setup. Different wireless vendors have features that can make wireless clients either roam more or less aggressively. If you have coverage gaps, or APs that overlap on the same channels, you can't really blame the phones if they don't roam properly. That's the advantage of going with the Dect version, you have a dedicated wireless infrastructure for the phones. Makes troubleshooting a whole lot easier.

ohhh, I do not know what channels the AP's are on.

I am a bit confused on dect over wifi.

The phones for both are basically the same, they are SIP in both cases. Dect and WiFi use different radios, so you cannot have a Dect phone without Dect APs. They do not interfere with one another, so you can have 802.11a/b/g/n APs and Dect APs in the same environment.

If you are running voice over WiFi, your wireless design becomes a lot more important. You need to look at QoS, adequate saturation for roaming, no overlapping channels, and dropping the transmit power on the APs to match the WiFi phones. If you have issues with your current WiFi phones no roaming well, it may have everything to do with your wireless setup and nothing to do with the phones. Changing phones may not solve anything.

Thanks, you have been a great help.

But all in all you like the Ascom system.

The only complaint I have, is that Ascom has a very narrow view of how the system should be used. They do not support using ring groups with the analog gateway. Instead, they want you to have a dedicated FXO port for every Dect phone on the system. That makes sense if you want your cordless phones to look like they are on the phone system you marry the Ascom system to, but that's not always going to be the case. I'm trying to deal with Ascom tech support on other issues, but they always come back to things like my ring groups, even though it has no bearing on the problems we're having. Another example: The AA50 GUI has an option to put custom caller ID on incoming calls. This would be helpful in my case, because we do have two different lines that ring through to the same phone, and there is no caller ID coming in. The GUI does not save the changes, and making the changes manually also doesn't seem to take. When I ask tech support about this the reply is "Why would you want to do that?"

So I'm happy with the equipment, but I'm not thrilled with the support. The AA50 from Digium seems to be a weak point. If I have another site that wants this system, I will spend some time looking at what Aastra has, seeing as it's all really the same thing.

Well it's in and running, like the handsets, they hooked it to our nurse call system. The handsets get a "text message" for every call button that is pressed. Nice.

It is having the same signal problems that our VoWifi tests found using sip handsets.

We will see how it goes.

Thanks