Back to this again. I have a client that has an ESI phone system, it keeps crashing. They are bound to ask me what to use as a replacement. I’ve been using a FreePBX box with Aastra 9143i phones for a couple of years, works great. Just checked uptime, 482 days and counting (can you beat that?). I don’t think the ESI phone system has run more than about 45 days w/o tanking.
The key is a phone w/ a decent-sized BLF. Right now their ESI phones have 30 buttons in the BLF. I see Panasonic makes some phones with a 24-button BLF. Anything else out there in the 20+ BLF range that work well?
Second Vote for the Yealinks - and with Add On Modules, you can have even more BLF - people LOVE the Touch-Screen on the 48 too - It’s the size of a small tablet!
I ordered the Yealink T48G for evaluation. The sidecars are okay but I need fifty phones so the T48G, while not inexpensive, is still a reasonable deal.
We have many Cisco phones and they have a sidecar option which has 32 buttons, you can have up to 2 sidecars with them so you can get 64 BLF/Speed Dial buttons.
( Cisco SPA5XX series )
Many companies have sidecars.
Grandstream has a few models with 24 BLF’s with a built in sidecar and 6 Line appearances…
(GXP-2160)
It really depends on if your talking a main phone for an operator or for everyones desk.
One other note, some companies have these old phone systems and phones where every line was a button, since VoIP really isn’t that way, they may not need that many buttons. Your choice becomes re-educate or imitate that functionality and keep it as close to the old school so it’s simple for them.