Hi all.
My company has been assigned to implement IP-telephony in a giant store/warehouse (11.000 sqm). They need 25 mobile users, so the question is which phones and technology to use. We first considered the Snom M3 DECT phone, but one base station has got a maximum capacity of 8 phone-connections. So now we are considering using sip-phones which works on WLAN, and then set up a large WLAN with repeaters etc. The phone we have been looking at is the Linksys WIP330 - looks very nice.
Does anyone of you have experience with setting this up, the linksys phone or maybe a better alternative?
I would very much apreciate your replies if you know good WLAN-access-points, repeaters, phones and everything to set up this system.
The WIP330 is discontinued and cant be found for love or money, I have tried a few wifi handsets and have yet to find a decent one, the best so far is the Aastra 312.
I’d suggest looking at Aastra’s sip dect solution though, thats the best way to do it as it means the handover between bases will work right. SIP Wifi works, but it immature tech, DECT is tried and tested.
I currently have 2 WIP330 phones, and the quality is… well… NOT great (to say it politely)
They create analog echo sometimes that I can’t get rid of, the DTMF within it I do not believe works well (we occasionally have problems getting through IVR’s that work fine from our aastra phones)… The battery life is horrible (< 60 mins talk time) and they are plastic, and not well made. Oh, and the real kicket is I occasionally I lose audio one direction or the other (randomly) or sometimes can’t pick up the call. (And it isn’t a problem in my network setup)
I WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THEM.
However, if you need a good sip wireless phone, you could also try Cisco 7920 phones (and configure SCCP in asterisk if you get a SCCP model). We have some of those as well, and they are GREAT… excellent talk time (8+ hrs), call quality, etc is awesome, speakerphones built in are pretty good… the only problem is they are not extremely full featured, but do the basics well!
As was mentioned before, you have the wifi problem switching between multiple bases, but it otherwise is a great phone. DECT, however, is definitely a better solution for a large area (then again, a good wifi network, built properly, in the warehouse for you may work great if you can get all on a single base, then the Cisco phone would be a great solution)
I’ve done a bit of work with some Kirk Telecom gear. They do DECT bases that connect to multiple RF ‘heads’ and can handle full full handset roaming with anything from tens to over a thousand handsets on a system.
The one I worked on was a baby version with eight analog lines, but the larger ones have ISDN or VoIP interfaces.
You’d have to look at the blurb on their site for full info, but it could give you the best of everything - good battery life, full roaming over a massive area and interfacing to Asterisk / FreePBX.
