QUESTION Any wifi handset recommendations?

mattseymour

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I'm looking for a simple wifi sip phone to use with piaf but notice these are thin on the ground. Something like the linksys wip300 looks ideal but they seem to be nothing but trouble,

The use case is a large old house setup as a conference centre with good wifi throughout but no structured cabling (other than what's installed for the APs). A dect solution wouldn't work as it wouldn't have the range to be useful.

I'd like something that looks like a normal cordless dect phone, rather than using an android handset, and has a charging cradle.

Ideally I'd like it to not cost too much.

Also, if I could have the moon on a stick, that'd be great ;)
 

ou812

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Have you looked at the Dect yealink W52P, I have one and it works very well and they have repeaters that can be added for more coverage.

Gary.
 

mattseymour

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Thanks folks, but I've discounted a dect solution as I have experience of trying to extend dect using repeaters... It wasn't a happy time. A school I used to work at was sold an expensive system for technicians to be reachable. It never really worked properly and the number of repeaters needed made it entirely impractical.

The durafon looks interesting, but I can't find a uk supplier... I'm not sure they're legal for use here. It's also a bit expensive for my application.
 

jroper

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Hi

How about Zoiper on a smart phone?

Joe
 

Jeffrccar

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Has anyone tried the Grandstream DP715-DP710 DECT IP phones?
 

Jay Deal

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Hi

How about Zoiper on a smart phone?

Joe


+1 on that. Search for threads on the forum that talk about cheap prepaid cell phones for use as a SIP extension. I picked up a Brightspot (T-Mobile MVNO) ZTE Zinger for $10 that runs Android and CSIP Simple. Lasts all day, it has Skype and plays music and videos too. And I didn't have to activate cell service to use it.

If you wanted an ideal situation for using a pre-paid cell as a SIP extension, get a case for it and put one of those wireless charging adapters (the flat cards that connect to your charging port) in it and then all you have to do is leave the phone on a charging pad. That's what I would do if used it regularly.
 

wa4zlw

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I have three DP715...they work well and have great audio. I think one of the chargers is not working so I need to get a replacement. Other than that it works.

Leon
 

Robert-BCC

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I have a kludgy solution that works really well. I had a client with a similar setup, but they had some cabling. Where no structured cabling was available, I bought a cheap access point, flashed it with DD-WRT, set it up as a bridge, and connected the bridge to the same kind of wired desktop phone the client used in the rest of the building. This reduced the learning curve. DD-WRT is remarkably stable and calls over WiFi are surprisingly good. This was just for one room, I suppose it would be difficult to manage at scale.

On the other hand, there are commercial wireless bridges that you can buy outright...
 

hbonath

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First Off - Wi-Fi IP Phones need a good wireless infrastructure behind them. What I mean by this, is an infrastructure where access points use Layer-3 Roaming/Tunnelling to a controller. Cisco LWAPP, or Aruba LWAPP would be examples of this. Standard AP's where the voice SSID is Layer-2 bridged to a switch trunk port will cause problems when the phone roams between APs. This is due to the way switches work:

Your phone's Wi-Fi chip has a MAC address, which is a Layer-2 address. A Switch keeps a MAC address to Port mapping, this is called the CAM table. When your phone joins a wireless network, it's MAC address is mapped to the physical port that the Wireless AP is plugged into, let's say this is Switch-A port 12. If you have another AP down the hallway, or on another floor - lets say plugged into Switch-B, port 10 - when your phone roams to that other AP, the new switch has to learn that your phone's MAC address is now connected to Port 10. The problem is that the original switch still thinks your plugged into it, on port 12 and there's some time for it to Age out. This will lead to dropped calls when roaming.

When a controller is used, each AP effectively "VPN" connects to the controller, you join the SSID, and the AP puts your MAC address inside this VPN. Your ethernet frames are then forwarded over the tunnel and de-encapsulated at the uplink port of the controller. Therefore when you roam between APs, each AP sends your frames back to the controller, and the underlying Layer 2 switching infrastructure is unaware since your IP Phone's MAC address is always associated with the Controller's uplink port.

It is for this reason that I never ever recommend Wi-Fi IP Phones, unless a Controller with Tunneling is being used - OR - it's a small office/home where only a single AP is present and thus no roaming would ever occur. See Robert-BCC 's post above.

DECT would be the way to go if you need wireless phones - the Yealink SIP-W52P is an excellent phone at a great price. They also have DECT repeaters available which handle the roaming seamlessly and always funnel the calls back to a single Ethernet port so even if you have several DECT phones associated, roaming is never an issue.

Hope this helps!
 
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