Cordless VoIP handset

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Glassboy

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#166084 2-Mar-2015 12:27

Hi y'all. What's the current state of the market with VoIP handsets? With UFB inching closer to my house and the possibility of a fibre connection I'm considering whether it is worth dumping the phone line and getting a VoIP connection.

When I've looked in the past the handset options have always been disappointing.

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#1249401 2-Mar-2015 12:49

I have a Gigaset A580IP at home which is an older model now but have not had any issues with it at all. Connected to 2talk as a VoIP provider. Choice of ringtones is probably the only issue.
I've also used/sold the Grandstream DP715 which seems to work well - the only thing I didn't like about it was that it played the 'ringing' sound after startup when it was setting the handset time from the base which was a bit strange.

CYaBro

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#1249449 2-Mar-2015 13:38

We use the Gigaset A510IPs here at work and I wouldn't recommend them.
We've had two with issues, out of a total of 5, that were replaced under warranty but another one is playing up now and the warranty has expired.

I like the Yealink W52P and have sold heaps of them and had no issues.

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vespaman

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#1249452 2-Mar-2015 13:47

get the Yealink W52P - good solid phone, not cheap

the grandstream 715's are just cheap and nasty.

raytaylor

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#1249463 2-Mar-2015 14:05

I am a great fan of just using a standard dect cordless phone with an ATA. You can get a much bigger range of features - like uniden's repeater boxes.

Ray Taylor

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Glassboy

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#1249509 2-Mar-2015 14:44

raytaylor: I am a great fan of just using a standard dect cordless phone with an ATA. You can get a much bigger range of features - like uniden's repeater boxes.

That's always a possibility, but I was hoping someone would surface a cool device that had extra utility like being a Skype endpoint.

I haven't yet run the numbers; VoIP Number vs bundled phone, toll charges, VoIP adapter vs (time) fixing the house wiring so I don't know yet whether it even makes sense. Mostly I just feel too old to be crawling around in the ceiling pulling cable. :-)

n4

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#1249513 2-Mar-2015 14:50

Glassboy:
raytaylor: I am a great fan of just using a standard dect cordless phone with an ATA. You can get a much bigger range of features - like uniden's repeater boxes.

That's always a possibility, but I was hoping someone would surface a cool device that had extra utility like being a Skype endpoint.

I haven't yet run the numbers; VoIP Number vs bundled phone, toll charges, VoIP adapter vs (time) fixing the house wiring so I don't know yet whether it even makes sense. Mostly I just feel too old to be crawling around in the ceiling pulling cable. :-)

How about an (old) mobile, just connected via Wifi? There are quite a few apps you could then use (and Skype of course)...

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#1249543 2-Mar-2015 15:17

My understanding was that Dect 6.0 + ATA had superior range/quality of voice over these devices, plus battery life?

Glassboy

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#1249556 2-Mar-2015 15:33

n4:

How about an (old) mobile, just connected via Wifi? There are quite a few apps you could then use (and Skype of course)...

That's an interesting point. There are three mobiles (actually four as I have a work one) in the house already, so if I bought the 10yo a cheap mobile, everyone would have their own personal phone anyway. However I still like the idea of a "home" number for things like the School's Parents Phone book. I don't really want the kid's friends ringing me to see if they can play, or a 10yo having largely unsupervised access to a phone.

But as time goes on and the kids get older, their is probably going to be no need for a home phone.

Glassboy

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#1249558 2-Mar-2015 15:35

networkn: My understanding was that Dect 6.0 + ATA had superior range/quality of voice over these devices, plus battery life?

DECT certainly copes with the tin ceilings in my place better than Wifi. We're within 150m of a Vodafone tower so mobile coverage is excellent :-)

raytaylor

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#1249576 2-Mar-2015 15:49

Okay so when you get fibre, presumably you are no longer going to have your adsl modem connected to the telephone jack point.

So what you do is go to the demarcation box outside the house, open it up and disconnect the incoming cable from the street from the internal wiring.
On some older houses, that cable goes right to the master jackpoint.
The incoming cable from the street will usually have a yellow, black, brown, white wire in it, and be Gel Filled - that is the wires will have an oily gel on them. The wire is usually also a thick black outer sheath.
In most cases you can simply snip the wires but you need to ensure you dont shorten the wires so they can be re-joined later.

So now you have an RJ11 (american telephone plug on back of adsl router) to BT (nz telephone plug) cable which can be disconnected from your router, and plug straight into the ATA box.
Suddenly your internal house wiring will run through the ATA.

The ATA connects to your router (sometimes they are built in) and that in turn connects to the fibre ONT box.

There should be no need to crawl around in the ceiling - well in 99% of the switchovers we do you dont.

As long as the ATA can emulate an NZ telephone line - the only thing it needs to emulate correctly in a residential situation is the correct ring pattern, then all the telephone sockets in the house will continue to work.

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deadlyllama

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#1249582 2-Mar-2015 15:53

Glassboy: Hi y'all. What's the current state of the market with VoIP handsets? With UFB inching closer to my house and the possibility of a fibre connection I'm considering whether it is worth dumping the phone line and getting a VoIP connection.

When I've looked in the past the handset options have always been disappointing.

Note that most fibre connections come with a "free" (no-extra-charge) phone line. It's delivered over VoIP, but often they won't give you the SIP login/etc -- the demarc point is the phone port on your ONT or ISP-supplied router. So don't go out and excitedly buy VoIP gear you may not be able to use.

I recommend doing what Ray suggests -- attach the new voice service to your house's wiring -- but again, the fibre installers may do that for you depending on which ISP you go with, so don't jump the gun.

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raytaylor

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#1249601 2-Mar-2015 15:58

Mobile phones with a sip client and wifi have a very short battery life and will suffer from overheating if its a bad design.
The wifi needs to stay on all the time in case of an incoming call and so all the sleep functions need disabling for it to work reliably. The battery life will also be very short.

A dect cordless phone will have better range than wifi because it uses a slightly lower frequency that can penetrate walls a bit better (1.7ghz vs 2.4/5.8ghz)

I used to laugh when looking at the boxes in the shops of cordless phones. There is usually a nice graphic where they claim that 5ghz phones go futher, but that has historically just been because 5ghz will not go through walls as well as 1.7ghz and therefore there is less interference, so its a bit of a trade-off. Less interference combined with less signal can sometimes mean more range. But I find 1.7ghz to be superior since they dont have wifi and other stuff to deal with. Only other cordless phones and there are many more channels since the bandwidth is only a few khz instead of 20mhz.

Either way they are all limited to 4 watts EIRP of transmit power.

There are DECT cordless phones like the grandstream mentioned above, where it connects directly to the router, which talks 1.7ghz DECT to the handset, and you can buy more handsets - but programming them is harder and its just easier and cheaper to use your current phones with a $99 ATA

In all the phone conversions we do, they ask as i am trying to work "will my normal phone still work?" "Will we have to get new phones?", "Whats our new number going to be?" bla bla bla. I tell them I will show them when i have finished.
Then they are super happy to find out they had worries over nothing - the new line works exactly like their old one did with their existing jack points and existing telephones.

Ray Taylor

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Glassboy

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#1249622 2-Mar-2015 16:17

raytaylor:

There should be no need to crawl around in the ceiling - well in 99% of the switchovers we do you dont.

From what I can see the [Chorus|Downer] dude split the incoming line inside the roof cavity and ran new cable to where I wanted the router. I counted ten breaks/connections in phone cable down to the kitchen. Some seem to relate to an old alarm system. Others make no sense what so ever. And then in the kitchen there seems to be a home made ringing extender in parallel to the phone jackpoint. I have a reel of cat 5, I have gel caps, realistically it would be half an hours work. And I'd do that in preference to reusing the VDSL jackpoint to spread out devices needing power. My "media shrine" has its own microclimate as it is :-)

In my last house I had a Krone block in a plastic box mounted in the ceiling with the both the existing Telecom and TCL wiring coming into it, and then the phone wiring jumpered off that. But I was younger and less lazy then :-)

coffeebaron

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#1249677 2-Mar-2015 17:36

I've done a few Yealink and there are a decent phone: http://nicegear.co.nz/cordless/yealink-sipw52p-cordless-ip-phone-base/
Couple of advantages of pure VoIP over ATA + POTS cordless:
- HD-Voice
- Smarter handset, e.g. if you are transferring calls, DND etc.
- Multiple simultaneous calls (depending on provider / number of handsets)

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n4

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#1249680 2-Mar-2015 17:38

raytaylor: Mobile phones with a sip client and wifi have a very short battery life and will suffer from overheating if its a bad design.
The wifi needs to stay on all the time in case of an incoming call and so all the sleep functions need disabling for it to work reliably. The battery life will also be very short.

Never had an issue with overheating like that using mobile SIP. However I'm sure you're right that the battery life would be much shorter than a cordless phone. In my case the cordless spends 95% of its time on the charging cradle anyway so I wouldn't care.

I was proposing a dedicated mobile phone to act as the home line, by the way, not using the existing mobiles for this purpose. So it would just sit around at home being a cordless phone (in answer to the OP's comment above).

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