Thought I would mention the Siemens Gigaset IP phones because quite a few people have asked me recently for a voip-centric alternative to having a desk phone or some sort of analogue phone attached to an ATA.  Particularly in the home environment, people want to have the flexibility that a DECT cordless phone provides; but rather than investing money in  obsolete technology, they’d like to buy a cordless phone that has the smarts built-in to offer the cost savings and other benefits that SIP offers.

At the enterprise level there are a number of offerings from the likes of Aastra, SNOM and Cisco, but for the typical SOHO/SMB environment this is overkill and $600 for a cordless phone is pretty out there. These phones are fantastic however when you put them in a campus environment with multiple bases that can handle call hand-off and all that magic.

I stumbled across the Siemens Gigaset C470IP a while ago; this is a great consumer-level phone that retails here in Aussie for well under $200.  In fact my friend AlexR at Maxo sells them at the moment for $149 + shipping.  Effectively for that price you get a cordless phone with great sound quality that has an ATA built in and a whole bunch of other features. For example, being able to read RSS newsfeeds on your phone and selecting from up to 6 VOIP providers to route your call; this is great for pennypinchers who want to route international calls to one provider, mobile to a second and local or national calls to a third provider.

You certainly can’t do that with a Uniden and most ATAs, plus you get better sound quality because the digital signal isn’t being converted back to analogue for the cordless phone.   And even better since the Siemens phones have an FXO port in built, if your intertubes are down or you dial Pizza Hut or 000 Emergency (and want Telstra to be able to route the call to the call center in the same city as you!), calls route to the PSTN rather than your more inexpensive VOIP provider.  Finally by having this connection to the PSTN in place, calls from your normal PSTN number arrive and ring the headset(s) just like they would if the cordless phone was plugged straight into the wall! This is of no value of course if you are on cable or a Naked DSL connection, but since Laura’s relatives all have our Telstra line here at home it was much easier to plug a cable in the wall than give everybody a  new number.  Maybe this will change when I finally upgrade to a Naked connection.

For a better review of the C470IP please check out this link where Arkenstone took the time to write a real essay.

I actually went with the “big brother” of the Gigaset C470IP, the S685IP recently when it was time to upgrade from a horrible, horrible cordless phone.  According to this page, the C- series are “value”, the S-series are “full featured” and the SL-series are “full featured and smaller sized”.  The main feature I wanted the 685IP for was actually its Wideband G.722 support, meaning it has hi-fi accoustics in the handset capable of recieving and sending better audio with this more advanced audio codec.   OK so it also looks nicer too.  It also has an integrated answering machine, which really only has the value that calls from the PSTN divert to voicemail on no answer.

Price wise the S685IP was $220 delivered in Australia from an online retailer in the UK. That and a weeks’ wait compared to $170 from Maxotel delivered overnight? I think it was definitly worth the extra $50