TeleFlow Communicator

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My Crashy Little SIP Phone

[ 1 Comment ] Posted on 07.11.08 under Uncategorized

Sometimes I miss my “plain old telephone”. OK, that’s a lie. I miss my plain old telephone almost every day. Our office made the move to SIP phones some time ago now for a host of reasons. The simplest of them was that we needed to know that this stuff really works, and how. We’ve long since sorted that out, and as far as “working” goes, SIP/VoIP is serving us well(Just how well it works for us is another issue entirely, and one I will not discuss here. Not today, anyway).

What isn’t serving me well is my SIP phone. It has an absolutely horrendous speaker phone, which I would swear cuts out over its own output. It’s also the first phone I’ve ever encountered that will Mute touch-tones(I.e. If I hit the Mute button to stop the speaker phone from cutting itself out, I can’t punch in touch-tones when interacting with an automated system). Sometimes, when you mis-dial a number and hang up, the previous mis-dialed number stays in memory, so that the next time you dial a proper number, the two numbers are concatenated, and you get a nice long string that doesn’t do anything(besides wasting your time, of course).

There are a few additional issues with it that leave me wanting, but here’s the one that really kills me: I, and others I work with, have been heard - repeatedly, mind you - to utter the words “My SIP phone just crashed.”.

Not a big deal, you say?

Then let me take you back a few years, to a time before SIP phones… It was an innocent time, where picking up a phone handset always meant getting a dial-tone (and if not, it meant a cord had simply come loose); it was a simpler time, where my simple phone didn’t know what a “subnet mask” or “IP address” was; it was a less confusing time, one in which my phone never told me I was unauthorized or forbidden, which was fine, because I didn’t think I should need anyone to give me permission to place a call; and of course, it was a time where we could take many things about our phones for granted, including the fact that no matter how much you used them, they would never “reboot” on you.

The little bit of pleading we did with the company we purchased the phones from in the early going fell on deaf ears, probably because they were literally deaf from the 1000’s of screams and moans of frustration.

I’m not here to condemn SIP/VoIP(although… no, no I won’t); I don’t wish to bite the hand that feeds me(or perhaps the hand that I’m promises it will feed me just as soon as it fully earns everyones trust). I really just hope that my sad little tale will remind everyone to tread carefully in this bold new(ish) era, and (unlike me) choose the new hardware that goes with it wisely.