Can anyone recommend a decent Wifi phone?

My personal recommendation is to stay clear of WiFi phones for a few reasons.
1.) Battery life. You are looking at 3-4 hours talk, maybe 20 hours standby...If your lucky.
2.) Interference: If you have anything else wireless in the office you may get this. Its not fun.

The only Pro to such technology is that it is easy to set up and the price is not to steep.

What i use and have tested many of are the Polycom Spectralink KIRK series phones. It runs off of DECT technology. Whats nice about that you may ask?
1.) Well battery life is wonderful. KIRK is 20 hour talk time and 200 hour standby.
2,) There is no interference with other electronics.

Check this post out. It give more incite on the subject and as well has other recommendations on DECT phones.

http://blog.voipsupply.com/mobile-voip/dect-vs-wi-fi-death-match%...

So that is my personal belief.

Thanks.

I have been using the SNOM M3 Dect phone and love it.

Ethan is correct about the OEM deal unfortunately, because provisioning the SNOM M3 is TOTALLY different from the other SNOM phones and the spec for how to provision the M3 isn't complete or accurate so we haven't been able to fully add it to the endpoint manager yet.

Has anyone tried the Polycom/Spectralink Wifi phones? They are claiming 8 hours of talk time. I've ordered one to test but maybe someone else has testsed the new line that came out.

Dect would be nice but for most of my customers the reason why they want voip is to run around to difference offices, to put a dect system in for one guy just isn't feasible. A good wifi phone really is needed.

The thing about Spectralinks WiFi phone is that you need a SVP server. Its a special server that does QoS on your system. Its not as easy as traditional WiFi, meaning you have your Access Point and your Phone on your network. With their system you will need the SVP server to which if i am not mistaken goes for about $500ish and thats not including the phones or anything to register them too.

It really is in your best interest to go DECT

I could have been misinformed but when talking to Polycom they stated that the SVP server is required and the phones will not work with out it. Please prove me wrong, i would love to sell this to people that do not want to shell out money for DECT, but this is what i was told.

Why do people think that DECT handsets need to be so expensive? Surely a decent ATA with a separate DECT cordless handset wouldn't cost much more than $100?

We have tried pretty much all the available wi-fi phones over the years. I love the idea of being able to use wi-fi hotspots all over the globe ... however like ethans I have not found any worth recommending.

The Snom M3 is a different thing altogether. We use them in-house and have rolled them out to customer sites and they really do work very well. A doddle to configure and call quality is second to none. Like others in this thread, I think they are excellent.

While I agree that the DECT phones are certainly viable, depending on your needs, there are a couple of decent wifi phones out there, and there may be compelling reasons to use wifi-based technology - especially in larger installations.

The Spectralink Netlink series is pretty good. They standards-based SIP phones (certified by Digium post-Polycom acquisition) that work well in my experience. The only thing is the SVP server requirement that adds about $450 to the cost of small installation.

More specifically targeted for higher end applications, I would also have a look at the Ascom FreeNET platform and the i75 SIP handset. Ascom most often sells integrated phone / messaging solutions in healthcare, and the cost is significantly higher ($550+ / handset), but the phones are essentially unbreakable (yeah, I said it...) and they roam beautifully, configure easily, and call quality is great.

By the way- the WIP330 from Linksys appears incapable of roaming between access points, in my experience. So it is crap if you have more than one AP. Same goes for most of the other junk cheapo Fisher-Price phones.

Hope that helps,

Josh

I see that the M3 has a limitation of eight handsets assigned to one base. Can the Handsets roam between bases? For example if I buy 16 handsets with two bases and put one base on a floor of a building, and the second base on another floor that is not covered by the first, will all handsets work on both floors?

Holy smokin' jamolies it's 500 bucks!

We had the Linksys Wifi phones (both models). As noted above, they were junk. Battery life was about 3 calls, and Linksys does not sell replacement batteries (at least at the time). Even if the did, the only way to charge them is in the phone, so how you gonna do that while you use the phone with another battery?

I found a good deal on the Nokia wifi phones on a clearance. They have been much better. Still by no means get through the day on a battery, but probably about 20 to 30 minutes talk time ok.

I found the audio quality improved greatly when I set the access point packet size to 1024.

We have 7 access points. When setting up for the Linksys phones, I was told that each AP needed to be on a separate channel. The Linksys phones moved AP to AP without problems. The Nokia phones had problems with that, requiring a reboot to change APs. I set all the APs to the same channel, and now the Nokia roam freely with no problems. I've told my users not to walk to far during a call, but in tests, calls are not dropped when walking to another AP.

I still have no spare batteries or chargers, but since I bought the phones brand new for $140/ea, I guess I can live with it.

Unlike the Linksys 330, the Nokia does not have a browser, so you can't use them where a web login is required for wifi security (like most hotels). That isn't really a problem for our application. The phones don't leave the property.