So I am using endpoint manager with grand stream 2170 phones. every time I make a change to a template the phone becomes unresponsive “kind of”. when picking the phone up nothing happens no dial tones or anything and the number pad stops working. the only thing that seems to fix it is a factory reset and creating a new template. anyone else have this issue? its a lot of extra work when adding 4 pages of BLF’s and Speeddial buttons.
What firmware are you running on the grandstream phones? I’m thinking that there may be a compatibility problem with the EPM and old GS firmware.
1.0.9.69
I have tried multiple firmware versions and same results…
Just save yourself pain and get away from those phones. I have ripped out ~100 of them recently in favor of Yealink T46 phones. The amount of “weird” issues with the 2135 and 2170 have become so frequent that it’s playing Whack-a-mole. It appears to us that they are just buggy to begin with, but as they age they get worse and worse. We’ve tried all firmwares, we’ve tried endless custom settings, hosted pbx, on prem pbx, we wireshark and pcap the traffic and some of the problems are just baffling. We switched to T46 and no problems.
… pain and if you can find a way get …
The cost of maintaining your phones (your time’s value) may exceed the amount of money it would cost for a ‘lateral upgrade’ to a phone that easier to support and maybe easier to manage.
I’ve never heard great things about the 2170 phones, but there are new phones that will definitely meet your needs and get you onto a new generation of phones. Sangoma (as much as I hate to shill for our corporate overlords) has many really usable phones at pretty reasonable prices that could be supported “out of the box”.
In fact, if you’re really interested in being cheap and transitioning to a completely different set of headaches, I’ll even take the opportunity to suggest Cisco 79xx phones in SCCP mode using the FreePBX instructions for Chan-SCCP-B and the Cisco Phone Manager. I get these phones for pennies on the pound and with Chan-SCCP-B they work fine.
I know the phones are not the best. it’s not my choice to use them. I personally don’t order the stuff I just configure and deploy them. I have ditched the idea of using endpoint manager this time around and just going to configure them manually. we tried some cisco phones for a small school and they were also a nightmare never figured out how to get them working correctly
I was half-kidding.
I wrote up a Wiki for installing SCCP Cisco phones into FreePBX on the Chan-SCCP-B website. Rule 1 - don’t use the SIP load. Cisco deliberately crippled the SIP load to get people to upgrade to their newer phones as they moved toward SIP. These phones have been the Gold Standard for IP Desk phones for years, so getting working in a reliable, repeatable, simple way has been a mission of mine.
If you’re gonna go cheap Cisco, go SPA504/508/514. They work super great with FreePBX.
I get you may not have a say in phones now, but if you start analysis on cost of labor/time + frustration of the user, the math makes sense pretty quick to a bean counter.
1 Like
If my experience is useful for you, I have used several different models from Grandstream and I haven’t had any major issues with them, at least not with manual configuration, which I understand is not your case because you are using EPM, but my installations are on the small side, the biggest having only 30 phones, so I don’t mind configuring them manually, as it is just set and forget.
2 Likes
i agree the Boss man chooses the equipment and i set the phones up. we have had minor issue with grand-stream phones and endpoint its different every install.
configuring them manually is just a pain doing it all remotely… i would like to just have the macs set it up and it just work when it gets installed. i may have to buy a few sangoma phones myself to test it.
1 Like
I have had great success with Grandstream as a very economical solution; from the 2130 thru the 2170 adn the GAC2500. And, I DO use EPM, with no issues; yet I do NOT use the firmware upgrade feature of EPM. I do edit the base files, including the firmware version desired (usually the latest), as whoever manages the EPM updates seems to always sabotages these. Therein lies the issue: get the EPM support team to remove their apparent bias against Grandstream phones and fix the parameters properly, and all will be fine. Grandstream now also does a similar thing that Sangoma does with “zero touch”. It’s called GDMS, and works fine as well.
This topic was automatically closed 31 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.