Has anyone tried out the new Digium phones? They released a different branch of 1.8 to support them, does anyone know how compatible that is with FreePBX? Is there new things that need to be built in FreePBX?
The phones look rather promising. Glad we haven’t ordered our phones yet!
I have all 3 models, the D70, D50 and D40. I like them.
They are standard SIP phones. You can use the phone GUI to configure the phones to use Asterisk. I configured the phone to connect to my FreePBX 2.9 distro in about 1 minute.
The new Asterisk -phones branch adds DPMA to use the advanced features of the phones like the visual voice mail, etc.
Alan, can you compare them (the d70 really, since it’s the most direct comparison I think) to phones like the Polycom ip 650 or the Aastra 6757i?
That’s my real question there: do you know if FreePBX gui would work with the 1.8 phones release of Asterisk? I’d like those advanced features. 
I can’t speak about the features that need DPMA since I have not used it yet. I have only had the Digium phones for a week and have not had much time to play with them.
DPMA requires the -phones build of Asterisk and I do not think that is part of FreePBX distro yet. You could build your own system by hand and not use the distro.
End Point manager does not have configs for Digium phones yet so out of the box EPM will not configure the phones.
I would compare the D70 with a Polycom 550 or 650 with a side car. The D70 has 6 line appearance buttons on the phone and 10 buttons on the side car. There are two small buttons below the 10 on the side of the phone used to scroll left and right so you have sort of a virtual side car with many buttons. However I don’t find this are usable as a Polycom 650 with 3 side cars.
There is a slot on the side of the D70 that appears to be designed to add additional side cars. there is also a jack on the back of the D70 for expansion so it looks like there is the possibility to add more buttons with additional side cars. I know of no plans from digium to add a side car but it looks like it could be done.
What about voice quality, and speaker phone compared with the 650?
I have not really done a comparison yet. I have not had much time to really use the new Digium phones yet.
If you could post back when you have compared them, that’d be great. We’re going to be purchasing at the end of this month… Looking at getting a few different types to compare and then sending the ones we dislike back.
I have the D70 phone. I find the sound very good - especially when using the speakerphone. I did some tests calling into my voicemail and left voice messages to test sound quality. The outgoing sound is not as high quality as the incoming sound. I found my Cisco SPA phones had much better outgoing sound quality. The mic in the receiver very easily picks up air noise when speaking which comes cross as a cheap phone sound. The incoming sound has good bass and clarity.
I am disappointed that I cannot get the sidecar buttons to behave as BLF keys. As mentioned you need the special Asterisk version unavailable through FreePBX to install DPMA. There’s no way that I know of to get the buttons to work as BLF keys through the GUI interface. By adding contacts to the phone, it sets up speed dial entries to the side car but that’s it. There’s no way to code it to watch for the Asterisk hints.
The font is small and hard to read on the screen. Maybe I’m getting old, but it’s not just the fonts. The resolution on the LCD screen is poor. I’m comparing it to the LCD screens on my Cisco SPA504G phones. I can clearly read it, whereas this Digium phone I need to move very close to the screen to see it clearly. There are brightness and contrat buttons but they don’t seem to do much as far as making the letters clearer to read.
The timer comes on when you are on the phone chatting, but the current date/time is only visible when not on a call. There’s a lot of wasted space on the screen where the date/time could easily fit. Especially with such small fonts.
When hanging up the receiver it’s a magnet that actually causes the hangup to occur. There is no switch hook button. I thought that was a nice design.
Overall for the cost I don’t think the phone is worth it unless you had the special Asterisk version that works with the phones. The online GUI interface has some bugs. It’s really lacking functionality/settings. I was expecting a lot more from a 2012 VoIP phone. Since I haven’t been able to get the DPMA working, I cannot comment on that. If I try to install it I get this:
[email protected] modules]# asterisk -rx "module load res_digium_phone.so"
Unable to load module res_digium_phone.so
Command ‘module load res_digium_phone.so’ failed.
Right now the side car is just a list of speed dial buttons.
The GUI Interface is temperamental. Sometimes it will lose settings. I upgraded to the latest version and still lose entire lines/extensions that were provisioned just by simply changing the dial plan on one of the lines. Line 1 never seems to disappear, but all other 5 lines are set back to default and extensions, passwords, station name, etc are all erased.
I’m disappointed in the Digium D70. I definitely expected more. The polished videos make the phone seem excellent but I think there’s much more value going with another brand.
You can’t just install the module for the Digium phones, it requires the “SLA” version of Asterisk that you can buy a support contract on.
I don’t know what Digium is thinking. Ward Mundy over at PBXIAF has been very outspoken on this issue.
That’s even worse!
I don’t know what they are thinking, but I’m getting rid of this $350 paperweight. eBay here I come! My fault for not waiting until people wrote some reviews. I searched a lot over a 2 week period and decided to trust the Digium Videos along with the sales department. I called Digium and the sales guy told me it would work on any Asterisk platform or on their Asterisk appliance Switchvox. Obviously he was misinformed.
It’s the most expensive VoIP phone I’ve ever bought, and it’s got the worst functionality. It seems it’s more of a ploy to get people to buy their support. It’s really sneaky to hide this vital info. Yeah sure - it works with Asterisk. Just not the Asterisk that you and I are using.
The Cisco SPA525G2 beats the pants off of this Digium D70 phone. It’s less expensive too if you look around!
You can run the digium-phones version of Asterisk with FreePBX. I have done it and it works fine. No conflicts as far as I can tell. Probably don’t want to use the digium auto configure and Endpoint Manager at the same time for obvious reasons.
I don’t have a problem with how Digium is doing it. I hope they can make some money at it to help keep the Asterisk project well supported and open.
First off, it should be noted that you can run the phone with any Asterisk version, but I assume that you mean you wish to use DPMA. In that case of course you need one of the Asterisk versions capable of running DPMA.
We’re running 2.11beta2.5 with Asterisk 11.2 and the Digium phones work great.
We have some heavily customized scripts that link into the user_login_out.agi to reconfigure the phones on agent login with speed dials, queues visible, etc depending on the department the agent belongs to.
So far we haven’t discovered any major problems with the phones and Digium seems active in developing new firmwares and DPMA verisons, and is responsive to input on improvements.
Has anyone had more experience with the D70? I have a few to test; but I’m having sound quality issues with them - it seems related to the handset volume setting and background noise like fans, rather than any sort of network issue. I get a lot of choppiness when listening on them, as though there was an over-active vad/echo/silence circuit.
Anyone else see that?
No problem getting them to integrate with Asterisk, however. They are very nice except for the call quality issues, which are critical.
I am deploying FreePBX with Digium D70 phones right now. I have not had any audio problems.
Are you running the latest firmware for the phones? The latest firmware is 1_3_2_0_54993.
How are you configuring the phones? Are you using DPMA?
Howdy,
Have you opened any tickets with our Support department? If not, please do, as we’d like to gather more information about what you’re experiencing and how it’s being introduced.
Cheers
Malcolm,
Yes, I’ve opened a support ticket, but I need to do more work at my end to learn how to capture and playback sip calls and see if the choppiness is in the network or in the handset. (I don’t think it is the network, because my Snom 360s work fine, but investigating the network has revealed unexpected bandwidth hogs and dns attacks already, to thicken the plot…)
My impression is that voice quality suffers if my fans are on, or the printer is churning out paper, but it is difficult to prove that. Some of the phones are in noisy lab environments.
This forum is the only other place I’ve seen mention handset issues, which is why I’m asking here.
I am using 1_3_2_0_54993 firmware.
Okay, I’ll wait for Support to work the ticket.
We have had 40 of them in production since April. We have not had any audio problems either; if anything, the sound quality is superb.
Is it possible that your PBX is running on a VM by any chance?
Thanks, it’s useful to know that others are getting good audio.
No VM here, small server in a small office, handling a dozen or so Snom 360s mostly.