The choice of IP phone is more important than the choice of your IP PBX solution. Open Standard based phones that operate vendor independently are a long-term asset protection since they can be used with any standards based IP-PBX system. The smarter the IP phone, the better. This means you want an IP phone that has a rock solid SIP stack (That's the communication protocol which runs the system and acts like the heart of your IP Phones.) No you don't neccesarily get the best software from the well know brands. 

The Changing Landscape of VoIP Phones: From Dumb Terminals to Intelligent Endpoints

The evolution of VoIP is similar to the shift from mainframe to PC. Phones used to be dumb terminals, now they contain high-end processors with with 20+ MB of RAM ethernet switches and lots of intelligence. With SIP, the end points do all the heavy lifting, soundprocessing and the entire communication protocol and intelligence resides in the phones. Once more, intelligence has moved from the center to the edge in telecommunications just like it did in data.

Choosing the Right VoIP Phone: Focus on Software Quality and User Experience

This is a new world. Rethink the brands you know and make sure you get products that have developed their own technology themselves and are proving to be thought leaders and more than just a big producer or budget manufacturer focusing only on price.The true key is the quality of the software that runs the system and the Telephone User interface (TUI). The later is the software that determines how the phone interacts with the user, what it can do and how to tell the phone what to do things. Some user interfaces are intuitive and pleasant to use others are not. Who wants a phone with an attitude?Quality materials and elegant and timeless design are also important. Most low-cost manufacturers buy the SIP stack from a third party and are quite distant to the software development of the phones firmware and simply use licensed or open source. These players are slow or unable to adapt to new technology, market requirements or bugs.

Leading VoIP Phone Brands: ABP's Selection Criteria

Leaders own their software and developed their firmware from scratch. These players have 6-10 years of in-house development expertise, participate in the IETF and the SIP RFC development and are in a constant interop process with the world.This is why ABP selected only a few leading brands in this space. For ABP's product selection team Aastra and snom are still the undisputed leaders in software, user interface, telephony features, design, programmability and add-on options. Linksys offers a great product when price is important and is attractive for many service providers that are migrating from Linksys ATA's to Linksys IP Phones.

The ABP Team