IM just curious as to what you guys prefer in terms of brands of phones on asterisk. I am planning a rollout of an asterisk with about 120 phones in the new year. So far i have tested with Aastra and Yealink. i was pleasantly surprised with the Yealink phones considering origin and price. But what are the opinions on Snom, Grandstream, Polycom even Cisco? any input would be very much appreciated.

Although we did not test all that you mentioned, we like Polycom by far.

thanks, i have a rep dropping off a cisco phone tomorrow and a polycom.

We don't have a lot of experience in this area---but so far, we like Yealink the best---mainly because it seems to be much easier to provision & program....but maybe that's just us.

You're in Canada, go with a Canadian company! Aastra phones are the easiest to provision if you use FreePBX distro and the Aastra XML scripts.

I've got a single Snom 320 in front of me, and one of my former clients had a mix of Snom 320 and 300. Had one Snom 320 "die" within a month. Would just boot and boot and boot, never getting anywhere. RMA'd back to the vendor I purchased from and got a replacement. Then I had two handsets (yes the speaker/mic part) die. Snom wouldn't help me on that, so I ended up finding a vendor who sold just the handsets for $25.00.

The web admin page has a ton of options, not very well documented. I don't like the shape of the handset or the texture (easy to drop off shoulder). Speakerphone is kind of weird. The first second or two of sound gets cut off before the speaker starts working.

I haven't figured out how to get MWI working yet. I think I'd go with another brand to be honest.

I use a Cisco 7960G with Trixbox. Love the phone. Simple to program, looks great, overall quality. Can be powered by PoE or power adapter. You just have to get phones that are already installed with SIP firmware, or somehow get the software from Cisco or another source and direct the phones to download it via TFTP. It's also really easy to make custom ringtones for them.

The older Cisco phones can be had online for relatively cheap now, at least the older models with the monochrome screens.

We've used many handsets with Asterisk and prefer Cisco. We tried both Cisco SPA504G and Cisco SPA525G. We have 1 client running approx 50 Cisco SPA504G.

Digium phones are also pretty cool though if you're using a distro (such as FreeBSD) which doesn't support the digium phone module then you will have problems with missed call alerts showing when calls are answered at other stations. I have been in touch with Digium who have advised there is no fix for this at the moment as it doesn't support the CALL_ANSWERED_ELSEWHERE sip headers and they may be looking at including this in to a Firmware update - but as yet it's tough :P

So Digium if distro supports the module or Cisco if not. Cisco and Digium are pretty easy to auto-provision which is what you want for a large environment, Cisco provisioning via TFTP server and Digium via HTTP.

With regards to message waiting indicators and BLF we succesfully had them working on both handsets with server based addressbooks.

We have also tried SNOM and some others, personal preference just didn't like the look and feel of those handsets.

Yealink is #3 already for a reason - the best value for the dollar.

#1 Cisco is losing share, overrated phones.
#2 Polycom is great, but overpriced
#3 Yealink - the most beautiful phone on Earth (T48), phone variety is great; provisions easily; they will pass up Cisco and Polycom, give it time.

(#1, #2, #3 market share)

Grandstream would be in the top six also.

You wouldn't happen to be associated with Yealink or Grandstream/

We have polycom 335; Digium D40; 1 snom and a Linksys. All of them are pretty easy to configure. By far the Polycom has the best sound quality. the Digium has more bells and whistles than the Polycom but it cannot handle direct sunlight and it sound quality is not as good as Polycom. It has been our experience that if the phone is left in direct sunlight it will lockup. We suspect it is do to overheating. Keep it out of the sun it works fine.

We do have a lot of experience, my graveyard of phones can prove that

Yealink, 110% of the way. They make a phone that is hot, really works and responds, price point is excellent.

T41P, T42G, T46G and the T48G, are awesome phones on every venue.
Grandstream, Snom, and Polycom, we dumped a couple of years ago. All for different reasons, known of which was cost.

Just my 2C

Walter

I've personally installed a few Polycom. They seemed fine. Audio was great, and was easy enough to configure. I have also recently helped install some Grandstream sets. They work okay, and have decent audio, but the color screens have crummy graphics, in my opinion.