Getting to know Yealink
So, yesterday we got a visit from one of our providers to talk about a new alternative on the IP Phone department.
We normally only work with Polycom and Aastra phones because of the quality, versatility and the brand itself. But we have to understand that not all clients are ready to pay double the price of their phones when other resellers are offering them very cheap alternatives that allegedly do the same thing. We worked with Grandstream a while ago but decided we didn’t want to compromise support and stability in such a way for price.
So we decided to look at Yealink phones because we’ve heard some good things about them and there’s a good price difference that might allow us to compete in different markets.
Yealink has 4 main levels of SIP Phones, high level phones like the T28, medium level (T26) and entry level (T20, T22…), plus video phones which I don’t know much about. There are also very basic level phones (T9, T12…) but I’m now going to discuss those here.
I’m working right now with a T26P (the P is for PoE) and I’m waiting for a T20 next week so I can check it out too.
Yeastar T26P
There are some pretty obvious similarities with Cisco Phones, the menu also looks a lot like the one in Polycom phones. Keyboard is responsive (thought now as much as Polycom’s) but I the keys are a little jumpy.
Configuring the phone is as easy as configuring a Grandstream, it can all be made via web, even ring tones, BLF, background light… But it can also be centrally configured via TFTP or FTP. Another good thing is that all those phones support wideband codec G722, even entry level phones like the T20. They also have two Ethernet ports for switching, the second port can even work as a router which not that many phones do lately.
Audio quality on my first test was pretty good and the 13 configurable keys are very useful for some BLF or speed dials (or using the 3 accounts that can be configured on the phone). Transfering calls and conferencing is easily done via the menu screen and the phone has most of the normal and most useful keys (hold, mute, redial…).
On the other hand, the phone does not support EHS (Electronic Hook Switch) as most of the Polycoms do and it doesn’t seem I can change the background picture on the screen, maybe on a future firmware update.
I’ll continue to work on the phone but right now I’m pretty excited about it, I’ll begin to work on auto provisioning and XML applications next…
[...] phone’s manual I found out that you could in fact change the phone’s logo as opposed to what i thought before. I think I had firmware 6.39.x.x and on the manual that came with the CD with instrucctions on how [...]
Hi mate,
Did you ever get the logo to autoprovision as we have everything in the autoprovisioning realm sorted but the logo seems to be a stubborn little nut.
You can get the phone’s config syntax for things that aren’t listed in the autoprovisioning manual by downloading the phone’s backup and expanding the .bin file and going through the many files in the directory structure it creates by the way, that’s how I got a pickup button configured as the button 16 which did not have documentation to back it up.