When the DoorBell Fon eventually failed I was forced to reconsider the situation at our front gate. I let that situation remain unaddressed for some time, until I eventually stumbled upon DoorBot. When DoorBot failed to impress I reached out to Pat, who kindly provided one of their 8028 SIP Door Phones for me to evaluate.
It has taken some time for me to get around to installing the Algo door phone. I was delayed because I wanted to have a small metal plate welded to to the fence post to create a proper mounting platform for the device.
This past week my wife was eagerly awaiting a UPS delivery. The delivery driver twice tried to deliver the large box. Even though I was home at the time I was never notified by the DoorBot app. I even tested it early in the day to ensure that it was functional. It was working, but not reliably.
The Algo device is in two parts; one that goes at the door and another that goes somewhere inside. The door-end unit connects to the back-end by way of a simple twisted pair. Luckily, I still had the cat 5 lead that I had pulled for the analog DoorBell Fon.
Given the urgencies of the current situation, I decided to mount the Algo door phone on a small wooden plate even before I had a welder pay us a visit. The physical installation took about an hour. The back-end unit went into our central hall closet, where I already had a UPS, network switch and tie lines to the network core back in my home office.
If you have ever configured a SIP phone using its web interface then the Algo 8028 will be very familiar. I took me less than 15 minutes to add a new user to our OnSIP hosted PBX, then configure the Algo 8028 to be that user.
Once registered to our hosted PBX pressing the button on the Algo door phone simply dials a preset extension. In our case, I had it dial my desk phone, a Polycom VVX-600. If that phone goes unanswered for more than 15 seconds the call forwards to my cell phone.
The happiest part of this exercise is watching the Algo door phone establish a call in a fraction of a second. I’m sure that I can be talking to the person at the gate within a second or two of their finger leaving the button. This is in stark contrast to DoorBot, where there could be many seconds of delay from the time the button was pressed and any potential action resulting.
Given that we are expecting some deliveries this coming week I should be able to gather some comments from our regular UPS and Fedex drivers. Once we have some experience using the Algo 8028 SIP Door Phone I’ll prepare a more in-depth review of the device.