Graves On SOHO Technology

We’ve had the Gigaset C610A in the house for quite some time. It’s long been on my list of devices for review. However, it’s difficult to find the time to commit to such tasks when the current model of Gigaset is so much like one of the prior models. There’s just no getting around the fact that the C61H handset is very like the C59H, which we’ve had for over two years.

That said, the C610A does offer a few niceties that were suggested to the company when they launched the line in the US back in 2009. Earlier today a new thread in the DSL Reports VoIP Forum prompted me to take just a little time to explore dialing by SIP URI on the C61H handset.

When I met up with Gigaset’s Tony Stankus in Las Vegas back in January he was quick to point out that the new model supported dialing by SIP URI from the contact list on the handset. Thus I knew this to be possible. I just hadn’t tried it myself.

This morning I grabbed the one C61H that we have here and entered a new contact. I found that I could make four entries per contact; home number, work number, mobile number and email/URI.

As a test I made a new entry for my wife, adding her various numbers and including the SIP URI for our home line as the fourth entry.

The base of the C610A has only one line registered at present, and that’s with an OnSIP virtual PBX that we use where I work. Our home line is on a different OnSIP virtual PBX. That fact that both accounts were with OnSIP implied that I should be able to send & receive calls in HDVoice. Nowhere along the call path would the media touch the PSTN.

Once the contact was created I was easily able to dial the SIR URI, and the call eventually fell to voicemail since no-one was at home.

Shortly afterwards I checked the process out on a C59H handset that was also registered with the C610A base. It too offered the “e-mail / URI” label for the fourth contact entry. So I tried to dial a SIP URI on that handset and found that it also worked.

Encouraged by this, I registered an S79H handset with the C610A base. Thereafter it also showed the ability to dial by SIP URI.

Next I hunted around for an S67H handset, which would be the oldest that we have on-hand. When registered with the A610A base it does not offer the option of using the email position to store a SIP URI. Nor does the SL78H.

So, it seems that at least three of the current crop of Gigasets offered in the US (C59H, C61H and S79H) support dialing by SIP URI from the contact list with the current firmware.