A real IP phone

Author's Rating:

Pros: Superior voice quality, good build, very reliable and some good features as well

Cons: A real pain to set up

The Bottom Line: 
An excellent phone, but if you don't like the idea of setting up a TFTP server and messing pages of plaintext config files don't bother!

Author's Review
The first time I saw one of these must have been in a department store in Croydon. They were everywhere but plenty of paranoid staff around who would probably freak if you looked at one for too long.

For quite a while now I have used Voiptalk's SIP service on my Nokia E61 which has far better quality than Skype and is also a good bit cheaper. unfortunately the ordinary PSTN-based phone services are expensive, even though a different company calls us every week asking to speak to the person who picks up the phone and pays the telephone bill. Since I carry my E61 around a fixed IP phone was needed to replace the expensive house phone

There are plenty of those around on eBay but most of them are sh*t from unknown Asian manufacturers so I got the second hand 7960 with powercube instead. This one had the SIP firmware pre-installed so it was supposed to be good to go but I soon found out otherwise.

Installing
The thing booted up alright at the start and found an IP address, I had to go Googling to find out what the default password is - settings have a password so inferior peons and intruders can't screw up the phone's settings. IT Managers digg that kind of thing.

After typing in the SIP settings the thing wouldn't connect so I rebooted it a few more times and suddenly realised the firmware was gone. I then had to set up a DHCP server and a TFTP server and spend a few hours looking on the net for a way to get the firmware back on it. I had to register on the Cisco site to get the latest firmware on it which it was eventually able to load from my TFTP server. The struggle wasn't over yet, I had to forward ports to it (I don't know if this was actually necessary, I could try deleting them and check if it still works).

For a while I was only able to make outgoing calls, but after a lot of screwing around with the settings I got it to connect properly to the provider and it all worked. and it still does now - I have only had the phone for about a week but all should be ok now.

There is a RS-232 port on the phone, if you really make a mess of it you should be able to wire up a cable from an old piece of tephelone wire that has a RJ-11 jack and get the thing going again. Lucky for me it never got to that point.

I wrote a thing about the installation process. In fairness I think I just screwed up, some people might get away without having any TFTP server or having the firmware erased - this could easily have been my fault but I didn't know what I was doing and was just blindly typing in codes from the web. http://97k.eu/blog/comments.php?y=07&m=09&entry=entry070912-190238


The phone itself
It is a well built phone made from the high-quality hard plastic phones are usually made out of - not this poor quality nuclear waste laden sh*te that comes from the back arze of China. Calling people is just like an ordinary phone - it just takes a while before it starts dialing unless you push the "dial" button on the phone.

The monochrome screen can be a bit unclear since the phone is standing in a dark corner but its not a big problem. Theres a switch built into the phone that I connect my computer off. It runs at 100Mbits but apparently that isn't enough for some people who do the whole HDTV streaming thing.

Quality is fantastic, just like an ordinary phone again. Havn't had any cut-offs except once I called and it didn't work or something which is probably not the phone's fault. My interweb connection isn't perfect either. You need to have 64Kbits of free upstream bandwidth to use it at the highest quality. It supports a few codecs with cryptic names but I can't remember what they are. The speaker is quite good, though I havn't used it much.

There's a light on the receiver that flashes when its ringing. So if you are listening to music you will see it? maybe its for deaf people but they wouldn't want to answer it anyway


Cool features
Beside the phone supporting about 6 lines there are other things you can do with it. Like changing the graphic it shows on the standby screen, it downloads this from the TFTP server as well. You can make new ringtones for it but in 8-bit 8KHz PCM RAW format. Still it can be done though I havn't tried it.

Phones can load up an external directory that is hosted on a webserver. It is a simple XML file that is very easy to modify and add entries to. I'm making a PHP script so I can view/change the entries from a website which should be a lot easier than putting them in by hand. Again this would be useful in some organisation where everybody needs a bunch of numbers in their phone - changing them would be as simple as changing the file on the webserver and every phone will automatically get the updated version.

TFTP Server
This is an protocol from 1980, almost as old as the concept of computer networking itself. Its like FTP but without the directory listings and the logging in. While this would be useful if you are installing 100 of these phones with a lot of common settings and the same firmware it is a real pain to set one up just to configure one phone. Once the TFTP server is set up things are a lot easier.

The phone doesn't actually depend on the TFTP server to be there when it boots up, but it will go look for one every time in case there is new settings/firmware on there for it. So once the thing is set up properly you can close the TFTP server