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The Gigaset Family of SIP/DECT Handsets For North America in 2010

Gigaset Communications reintroduced their line of SIP/DECT cordless phones into the North American market at CES in January of 2009. It wasn’t until a few months later that I received a couple of sample systems; the A580IP and S675IP. After actually using it for several months I reviewed the entry level A580IP system in July, and we have since been using it as our primary home phone.

One of the great things about the Gigaset phones is the way you can mix a variety of handsets against a single DECT base. The basic systems are complete systems, meaning that each includes one DECT base and one cordless handset. Beyond that you can add up to five more handsets, and they don’t need to be the same model.

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Aastra’s 6739i vs Polycom SoundPoint IP650?

Aastra 6739i Desk PhoneOn the VUC call of May14th we were fortunate to be joined by Tony Lewis, CEO of Schmooze Communications, the creators of PBXact. Tony was, to the best of my knowledge, the very first person to join the call using Aastra’s latest uber-desk-phone, the 6739i.

Tony was able to fill us in on some of more details about Aastra’s product line, and specifically their implementation of wideband voice…or as they call it “Hi-Q.”

It was just over a year ago that there was a hint that Aastra has released some firmware for their existing 57 series phones that implemented G.722 wideband capability. However, like snom before them, they were adding wideband voice support to a hardware platform that was not from the outset designed around such capability.

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Gigaset Preset Configurations Now Includes IdeaSIP

Not long ago I got word that Gigaset was working to add more ITSPs to the presets in the configuration tool in their SIP/DECT cordless phones. The Gigaset DECT base can update its list of ITSPs in much the same manner that it checks for firmware updates.

This afternoon IdeaSIP confirmed that they are now listed as one of the ITSPs for which there is a preset configuration. They have also posted a page on their web site walking you through the setup process.

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Panasonic KX-TGP5x0 Series Now Asterisk Certified

I read by way of TMC that Panasonic’s news-ish KXTGP-5×0 range of SMB SIP/DECT phones are now Asterisk certified. These phones look and feel very nice, and they do have support for G.722 allowing for wideband calling over SIP trunks.

As has been noted elsewhere the firmware for these devices has been a little strange, and Panasonic themselves don’t seem to have been quite prepared to support the phones in the field. Early adopters have had a difficult time obtaining support.

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PBXes Now Supporting HDVoice

A post over at the VoIP Tech Chat forum at DSL Reports points out that PBXes, a service of the German company I-P-Tel, has recently added support for HDVoice in the form of G.722. Apparently this is just a trial…

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Amazon Responds About SIP Attacks From EC2

On April 18th Amazon finally responded publicly with respect to the SIP attacks recently suffered from hosts within their EC2 service. Their response comes in the form of an informational security bulletin posted to their AWS Security Center.

There have been some recent discussions about SIP brute force attacks originating from Amazon EC2. We can confirm that several users reported SIP brute force attacks originating from a small number of Amazon EC2 instances about a week ago. It appears these attacks were designed to exploit security vulnerabilities in the SIP protocol. There is nothing specific about this attack that requires Amazon EC2. It was a brute force attack that could be launched from any computer on any network.

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