What Phones to Choose
From SIPfoundry sipXecs IP PBX, The Open Source SIP PBX for Linux - Calivia
What is the best phone for sipXecs?
Choosing a phone for any VoIP system is difficult if it is important to you that more advanced features work as well. Every SIP phone is capable of initiating and receiving calls. More advanced features require phone firmware to be compatible with the SIP standard and implement all the necessary features.
sipXecs is the only open source IP PBX system that auto-configures all the phones. No more logging into phone Web server and configure one phone at a time. sipXecs provides plug & play. This not only includes basic phone configuration, but also includes advanced features such as directory, speed dial, BLF, firmware management, phone auto-discovery, and automatic remote restarts.
From a technical perspective the best phones are those that have been thoroughly tested and the phone manufacturer has been willing to fix issues that came up during such testing.
The best tested and most capable phones with sipXecs are the Polycom SoundPoint and SoundStation SIP phones.
The next best solution are Nortel 12xx phones or phones from SNOM.
Other phones with a reasonable feature set include Grandstream and Aastra.
Counterpath softphones are tested well and work, especially the commercial versions.
The [http:://www.twinklephone.com Twinkle] soft phone on Linux works well.
The latest Polycom firmware release 3.1 now offers full support for Music On Hold and Busy Lamp in conjunction with sipXecs. This firmware release is fully supported plug & play in releases 3.10.3 and 4+ of sipXecs.
How to test a phone
If you have a phone that you would like to test without actually setting up a sipXecs system, you can use the public test server at interop.sipxecs.org to assess whether or not it is compatible with sipXecs.
