Does anyone know and have experience with IAX2 phones?
I just ordered a few of these Yuxin YWH500D from: iareaphone.com/Hardware.htm
I cannot recommend this retailer. I placed my order 3 days ago and I am still unsure if they are going to fill it. They have not responded over the past 3 days to email or phone calls.
I have found that the IAX softphone work flawless. We have had problem with SIP and firewalls. Basically, we have phones behind 1-2 routers both with NAT and SIP doesn’t seem work well.
The company did ship them and I got them on Friday. They came with older firmware so I had to upgrade them to support IAX2. The upgrade was very easy using their tool called PalmPC. This application also works for configuring the phones. It worked pretty good for that. It lets you save the config to a text file so you can upload the file to other phones. All I had to set was * IP address, user, password and display name. Seconds later, it logged in and was taking calls.
The IAX phones connected so much easier than SIP. We had an issue where the phone was behind a DSL router doing Nat and then Linksys router doing NAT. SIP phones would not work much of the time. We also had issues where some ISP’s were blocking SIP traffic.
The phones are much cheaper in quality than the Cisco’s or Polycom, but the IAX2 is worth it. I hope that some other phones like Polycom will get on the IAX2 protocol bandwaggon.
I just bought from www.ngnsky.com, AT-530 and received it 2 days ago. This phone supports IAX as well. Although I must say, my Aastra looks way better but on the other side, this phone has been so easy to setup (no need to worry about NAT issues, good option to use remotely). Although it looks cheap, I can’t complain about the sound quality, the speaker phone although the volume is a bit weak, it’s still clear. (which is important to the users).
I guess I would just like to compare notes about what you bought… How is the quality of the call? Can you compare the quality to other phones as well?
How much did you buy your IAX phone for?
I have Cisco 7960’s on SIP and Plantronics headset for Softphones. The quality of the new IAX2 phones are not as good, but very acceptable. The audio is not as rich, but doesn’t echo or lag, so it is fine. They are better than cell phone quality. I paid $80 each. The speaker phone is good and loud. The ringer and speaker has plenty of volume. Both looks like they have 2 ethernet ports on the back.
I just noticed that the Yuxin YWH500D does not either. I don’t think that is going to be a big deal with my users. We seem to use email to manage the Voicemails. On our existing Cisco phones, the VM lights seem to burn all the time.
It seems like something that could be added to the phones via firmware upgrades.
Thanks for the info! regarding your comment “I have Cisco 7960’s on SIP and Plantronics headset for Softphones.”
I have tried to play with the softphones before but it always had poor quality that’s why I settled with hardphones. What type of Softphone do you use and what particular Plantronics headset? Do you find the quality acceptable? (meaning comparable to hardphones you’ve tested…)
I use the Plantronics CS50 USB with Counterpath. I also use the headset with Skype all the time. The CS50 is great at blocking out background noise. If I have my iTunes going at a reasonable level, it blocks it all out.
We have a bad experience with the Yuxin YWH500’s, I don’t suggest these phones. We use all of these remotely and it has a really, really bad echo issue when the phone is on speaker phone. It also has some static when the person talks loud.
Unfortunately the manufacturer is in China so support is non-existant. We have been working with the vendor but we have pretty much exhausted all options (firmware updates, tweaking of options).