MichaelNZ: Yealink have the worst reliability of any VoIP phone I've owned. I've had 3 of them fail on me. 1 was replaced under warranty, another was just out of warranty but after I applied some (public) pressure to Yealink, they replaced it and the other is used by my Mother and that too has gone faulty.

They also had a lot of bugs with their firmware and every new release was worse then the previous. Emailing Yealink about this was a waste of time.

Snom is a bit techo to configure but once configured work ok. The few times I have done anything with Panasonic, they seem to be ok, but not as featured as other VoIP phones. Give Cisco a miss. The hardware quality is good but they are very proprietory. Basically designed to work with Callmanager not Asterisk as 2talk uses.

sbiddle:

MichaelNZ: Yealink have the worst reliability of any VoIP phone I've owned. I've had 3 of them fail on me. 1 was replaced under warranty, another was just out of warranty but after I applied some (public) pressure to Yealink, they replaced it and the other is used by my Mother and that too has gone faulty.

They also had a lot of bugs with their firmware and every new release was worse then the previous. Emailing Yealink about this was a waste of time.

Snom is a bit techo to configure but once configured work ok. The few times I have done anything with Panasonic, they seem to be ok, but not as featured as other VoIP phones. Give Cisco a miss. The hardware quality is good but they are very proprietory. Basically designed to work with Callmanager not Asterisk as 2talk uses.

I had a discussion with have a friend in the US at a conference last month.  He's deployed somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 Yealink phones in the past year and have had the lowest failure rate of any brand of hardware. Even Yealink are openly proclaiming they have the lowest failure and return rate of any phone brand in the market right now. One can only presume you had bad luck because facts certainly don't back your claim. 5 years ago Yealink had very dodgy firmware, I haven't encountered a major problem affecting day to day use for probably 2 or 3 years now but compared to other brands of hardware such as Cisco that I deploy thousands of per year, the Yealink phones are only a small percentage. T2x/T3x phones look ugly but perform well. The T4x phones are fantastic.

Not all Cisco phones are designed for CM - yes the 79xx phones are but all of the SPA9xx, SPA3xx and SPA5xx series phones work perfectly in a SIP environment and still have one of the best GUIs and provisioning of any phone on the market. The new Panasonic kit is fantastic but not suitable for configuration by somebody who knows nothing about VoIP which is obviously the case of the OP. All setup really needs top be done via auto provisioning.

sbiddle:

I had a discussion with have a friend in the US at a conference last month.  He's deployed somewhere in the vicinity of 10,000 Yealink phones in the past year and have had the lowest failure rate of any brand of hardware. Even Yealink are openly proclaiming they have the lowest failure and return rate of any phone brand in the market right now.

sbiddle: Not ringing sounds like it's configured incorrectly.

I'm by no means a fanboi, I'm just defending them against claims of being poor quality. Having deployed lots of them I would certainly have no issues continuing to do this, and support them.