I’m looking for WiFi phones that I can use in a hotel room. I already have samples for the Grandstream GHP611W and GHP621W for testing. But I was wondering if any other wifi phones for this type of user are available (for a reasonable price). Until now I haven’t found any.
I prefer to have a a phone with display (something that the Grandstreams that I mention lack), this to show the room number and to see if the phone is connected.
Preferably the phone needs to be supported in FreePBX Endpoint manager.
We use those phones. They are fine and like most hotel phones they are meant to have faceplates and they even have templates you can use to order the faceplates based on your needs.
Is this a newly built hotel, without communication cabling?
Otherwise, why don’t you use the existing POTS (analog phone) cabling as 10baseT to run (for example) GHP611? Most IP phones will run PoE fine on two pair. With luck, there will be an RJ11 jack near the phone that you can replace with an RJ45. The Wi-Fi phone needs AC power, which may have high installation cost (e.g., require licensed electrician). If just plugged into existing desk outlet, may have issues with guests unplugging them because they need the outlet to charge their smartphones and tablets.
This might not be the best option for this. Phone wire is cat3 rated which will do the lowest level of PoE and most modern IP phones need more voltage than what cat3 can provide. Even if there is enough power, traditional hotel setups (at least in North America) will have all the phone wires terminating to 66 blocks. The standard was 16 port cards, so the rooms would be wired at 16 rooms per block with 50-pin amphenol connectors going to the PBX.
So this would require the phone wiring to be in good condition in every room back to the 66 blocks. That the cat3 power is enough. You would have to replace all the RJ11 jacks in the room with RJ45 jacks. You would then have to go and take each phone pair off the 66 blocks, terminate them into RJ45 ends, remove the 66 blocks and mount the PoE switch because you’re not going to have a lot of extra wiring to be running it across the room.
Check out the Grandstream GRP2612W. If the phone is V2 or above, it can have up to 4 sip accounts on it. The older versions only allow 2 sip accounts. This is a fully featured enterprise phone that can work on Wifi at 2.4G or 5G. It also has an ethernet port and is POE capable. If you need something with more buttons, the GRP2615 and GRP2616 also support wifi. Keep in mind that the quality of the hotel wifi directly affects the call quality.
While I doubt this will work with Endpoint manager, Grandstream has a free provisioning service called GDMS that allows you to remotely provision their phones.
how many rooms to service?
how big is the hotel?
how is your current wifi service deployed?
how congested are the currently available 2.4g/5g/6g wifi channels?
If it fits, I would suggest a full on 802.11s ‘mesh’ (not any propitiatory so called mesh) on 6G (tri-band) wifi 6e/7 hardware.
In each room , as little as a gli.net mango doing wds at $13 each would suffice for an Ethernet phone, a wifi signal and a hardware Ethernet port in that room,
The Fanvil H5W is a hotel phone with a display and runs off WiFi. It technically is available in endpoint manager, but you can only configure the line, not any of the speed dial keys. However, Fanvil has an IP phone management platform that will allow you to configure the phone in full.
With that said, I personally would not put a wifi phone in a hotel guest room. If the guest had to call emergency services and the WiFi goes down or is overloaded to the point calls can’t be made, that would be a recipe for a lawsuit I would think.
If the guest rooms all have analog phones in them currently, use a hardwired gateway like an Adtran TotalAccess 924e at the MDF and get some new analog hotel phones.
Thanks for the tip for the Fanvil and Grandstream wifi phones! As for the other questions and comments, I have taken all that into consideration, just asking for WiFi phones.