Earlier this week Asterisk guru Ward Mundy pointed out an E-bay auction for a phone that looked kinda familiar and purported itself as offering “HDVoice” – the Dreamwave Networks D28p. A quick Google online revealed that Dreamwave Networks are based in New Jersey, and their web site looked to have both a brochure and some documentation about the device. I even found a tutorial on setting up the phone for use with various Asterisk distributions.
Matt Riddell of VentureVoIP is always informative and a great read. This morning I see that he has posted an article listing 39 Free Soft Phones. What a great resource! He goes so far as to only list those that…
Nothing gets my blood pressure rising like someone passing off bad or misleading information as the real deal. This afternoon I followed a link in someones Twitter stream over to VOIP School where there was a post about HDVoice dating back to mid-June. Go ahead and read it, that way you might come to understand my exasperation.
This set of screen shots was taken from the web GUI of the Gigaset S675IP, but the web GUI for the A580IP is very similar.
A couple of weeks ago I was told that our corporate HQ in Cambridge UK was starting to think about adding new conference room. Since I oversee the hosted IP-PBX that we use in the US they sought my suggestion for a suitable new conference phone. The requirements for the new device are a little odd, making device selection something of a challenge.
After announcements back at CES2009 in January the Gigaset line of cordless SIP/DECT are finally starting to become available in the US. The A580IP model is the entry-level system in the line-up, which we’ve been using around here for the past couple of months.
At the outset of the review process I was a little skeptical about installing an entry-level consumer cordless phone in the house. We’ve tried a lot of hardware and have some fairly clear ideas about what we need from it. However, the A580IP brings with it the possibility of wideband calling over IP into the cordless domain. That proved just too to attractive to not give it a try.
The A580IP system that we have installed consists of one DECT base and a set of three A58H handsets. A starter system comes with the base and one handset. You can add up to five additional handsets to suit your specific needs. In fact, you can mix and match handsets, using the entry level A58H, middle of the range S67H or high-end SL78H all on the same DECT base.