Calls for my business ring, my phone and the kitchen phone. Now we have individual incoming VOIP lines into Asterisk plus the home PSTN service. My wife and I both run our respective businesses from our home offices. It’s basic switch functionality and when you stick Asterisk behind this you have a really flexible solution to handling multiple incoming lines and different types of users. And you can decide which calls use the built-in answer machine and which do not. From this screen, you can choose which handset rings depending on the service it is coming in on. This is, for me at least, the coolest feature. I haven’t done this yet but I can’t see any major obstacles apart from the time it will take to get a csv spreadsheet into vcard. The directory needs to be in vcard format. Note also you can upload/download your handset’s directory from here too. I configured my handsets first to give them meaningful names: “Alan’s, Helen’s and Kitchen”. As you can see again, it’s a simple, clean and easy-to-understand interface.Īfter that, you are ready to choose which handsets work with what services. The next section allows you to select the codecs you’d like each service to support and their priority. Here’s a default screen showing most of the options. You configure the details for each service by clicking the “Edit” button. But apparently this setting is needed to get the message waiting light working properly when you are using Asterisk’s voice-mail anyway. I’m not actually sure if this made any difference, as I think I didn’t click the “Active” box first time round. For me it’s my Asterisk server… Only one change seemed to be needed to get the registration to work: Add subscribemwi=yes to your sip.conf. Next is to configure some VOIP service providers. Here’s the login screen you first see:ĭue to the way I have our home network set-up, I used a static IP address for the base unit. Now let’s look at how the whole DECT/VOIP thing is configured and what really makes these stand out for a home phone…Īccessing the Web based user interface was easy. They have a nice big colour screen where you can – apparently although I haven’t done this yet – add pictures to your directory so the phone shows the caller’s face or avatar when ringing.Īnyway, all-in-all my initial impressions of the system was very positive indeed. She said it was brilliant! And having now just had a conversation with her somewhat hard-of-hearing father, he also attested to the much better sound than our previous telephones. The first thing my wife commented on when we were talking internally was the voice quality. It took a good 8-10 hours for them to get fully discharged. To discharge them all, I made internal calls between the phones and put them all on handsfree. The first full charge took between 3 and 5 hours depending on the handset. The batteries are supplied (a pair of AAA rechargeables). When you get them you need to do a first time charge and discharge cycle. I’ll cover that in detail in a minute.īut first the handsets. Once the physical install is done, you can do almost everything else from the web based interface of the base station. Once I’d plugged the phones in and got them charging, and base station in to the LAN, the phone started showing me the weather forecast in Lisbon! □ There are very easy to follow 1st time instructions that get the system installed and running. My initial impressions: Nice packaging and a good looking handset. (Just click on the thumbnails for bigger images) Here’s my personal review of these new phones for use in our home network. They also support Bluetooth so you can use a wireless headset and upload/download your mobile phone’s address book etc. This is the latest release and the handsets support very high quality voice between each other and on compatible networks. The Base unit can support up to 8 incoming services: 1 x PSTN, 1 x Gigaset VOIP Network, and 6 further VOIP (SIP) services. There were a few reasons I selected these Siemens phones, but the main one is their ability to act as a basic telephone switch between handsets and incoming services. I’d been waiting for this model to become available for a couple of months and they were offering the best price and the were first to get them in stock too! I bought these from a UK based on-line telephone vendor DSTelecom and their service and price was very good. I’d spent quite some time looking for a decent replacement for our aging and now unreliable existing DECT handsets. This is a DECT home telephone system with support for both PSTN and VOIP services. Last week I purchased a triple set of the brand new Siemens S685IP telephones.
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