Just a few days ago VoIP Supply announced a new desk phone that’s capable of both SIP and IAX2. Not much has been forthcoming in the way of IAX2 capable end-points, even though the protocol has wound its way through a lengthy standards process. Digium has dropped the little IAXy (aka S101i) ATA device a while back. Last year Zeeek tried the Allnet 7960 which is IAX2 capable but lacking in some ways. So it seems that to date there just haven’t been any truly business class IAX2 phones to be had.
Perhaps this new phone from Citel may change this situation. It certainly has the look of something that we’ve seen before in enterprise telephony. That is, it looks like the sibling of a prior generation of Nortel IP phone. It’s the middle device in the trio shown above (click for larger image) , between a Nortel IP 2001 (left) and a Nortel IP 2002 (right.) Notice the family resemblance?
Citel has a long history in enterprise telephony, offering their Portico™ devices that perform protocol translation allowing legacy proprietary phones to be deployed in standards-based installations. This new phone appears to be designated their model C4110, which according to the product specification is purely SIP capable. Adding IAX2 capability could be accomplished in a firmware revision.
Update: Wondering why use IAX2 vs SIP? The VoIP Wiki has a nice comparson and VoIP Supply is running a related contest collecting comments on their blog.