Wireless handsets that work?

[Jason Learmouth]

I'm curious if anyone out there in the real world has found a WiFi handset that works reliably on ShoreTel and gets good feedback from the customers.

The Ascom phone is not really the sort of handset that looks *cool* in the office. The Hitachi phone batteries die in minutes (nearly) and Hitachi doesn't even do it any more.

I haven't had much luck with Nokia handsets on WiFi SIP.

I'd love to hear about a WiFi handset that isn't going to give me more grief that it's worth.

Thanks,

[blanning]

Jason,

We are currently working on implementing a spectralink / polycom solution. We have used the handsets before with different firmware to integrate with Nortel systems and had excellent luck. I will post again and let you know once the ShoreTel integration is done.

[blanning]

As an update for everyone who wants to use this solution.

We have now finished our deployment of Spectralink 8030 handsets (SIP) with a ShoreTel system. The handsets work great and from the ShoreTel side are pretty much like any other SIP device (see ShoreTels Articles on Spectralink Handsets or the IP8000). From a Spectralink side you must be running a TFTP server to give configuration files to the SIP handsets each time they come up.

Attached are examples of the two types of files used, one general file for all phones, and then a specific user file for each phone that gives it a name and extension. NOTE!!! These are copies of the files that I used, you will need to configure them for your own use! ALSO - the site made me change the extensions of the files they MUST be changed back to .cfg files or the phones will not use them.

Here is the link to the PDF that I used to build them the first time.

Hope that this is a help to everyone.

[jmitchell]

Great post, I was just able to get the 8020 phones working correctly. I just have a couple quick questions. If I dial the wifi ext and press rej on the handset to send it to voicemail, I hear "invalid extension", in the config files, what controls this? Also is there an easy way to program soft keys?

TIA

[blanning]

I do not know that the call rejected destination is controlled by the config files, but I will look into it. As to the soft keys, I have not found a way to program them yet. It seems that Spectralink does not support all the phones features with the SIP firmware that is necessary to integrate with the ShoreTel product.

[blanning]

Here are a couple of options:

# PROXY1_MAIL_ACCESS is the main voicemail dial number
# Examples:
# PROXY1_MAIL_ACCESS = 7999
# PROXY1_MAIL_ACCESS = sip:[email protected]
# PROXY1_MAIL_ACCESS = [email protected]
PROXY1_MAIL_ACCESS = 7002

This section of the "all_users" file seems to indicate that there are several ways to point the phones to voicemail. perhaps try some of the other ones. The users that I set up had desk phones and never checked their mail from the wireless sets, they only forwarded to them on occasion so they could walk around.

And then this section

# FAVORITE = dial_string; username
#
# The username can be blank and can include escaped chars.
#FAVORITE = 3001; Bob
#FAVORITE = 3032; Jill in Accounting
#FAVORITE = 3013; SoundPoint 3013
#FAVORITE = 3020; Jane
#FAVORITE = 93035551212; Richard's Cell

Seems to indicate that favorites can be stored to the phones through the SIP file for each individual user, but I never had any luck getting them to work as expected.

If anyone else has any luck with either of these things please post and let us all know.

[jmitchell]

Blanning, were you able to get the phones to transfer calls? I know if you have a call active and press the function button there is an option to transfer however it doesn't seem to work. Is there a feature code possibly?

[jasonpgreen]

We have the Spectralink 8030 SIP wireless phones working on Shortel 9.2, but they do not work as part of a hunt group. Do any of you have any experience of this?

Jason

[jmitchell]

Hunt/Work Groups

I am also unable to make the WiFi phone work in a hunt group, seems to be limited documentation. In the KB article, it mentions that ShoreTel was able to make the phone work in a hunt group setup.

[blanning]

Unfortunately we only have those deployed with a ShoreTel at one customer right now and they only needed bare bones functionality so I have not had an opportunity to chase that any farther. The documentation that ShoreTel provides is scarce as scarce can be on how they actually made this work so I figured out most of what I posted on my own.

[Techster]

I just wanted to bump this thread because it helped me get these phones working when TAC and Polycom couldn't. Thanks!

[trmcd]

Does anyone have experiences with these phones and v-series switches? Just curious.

[johnthephoneguy]

We have quite a few deployed and there are some issues that have not yet been overcome. The transfer is a little klugy and demands the user use the 8030 soft keys. Conference does not work at all and of course limited integration with call manager. It would also be helpful if they worked on allowing use of a directory

[chrisknight]

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!

As an update for everyone who wants to use this solution.

We have now finished our deployment of Spectralink 8030 handsets (SIP) with a ShoreTel system. The handsets work great and from the ShoreTel side are pretty much like any other SIP device (see ShoreTels Articles on Spectralink Handsets or the IP8000). From a Spectralink side you must be running a TFTP server to give configuration files to the SIP handsets each time they come up.

Attached are examples of the two types of files used, one general file for all phones, and then a specific user file for each phone that gives it a name and extension. NOTE!!! These are copies of the files that I used, you will need to configure them for your own use! ALSO - the site made me change the extensions of the files they MUST be changed back to .cfg files or the phones will not use them.

Here is the link to the PDF that I used to build them the first time.

Hope that this is a help to everyone.

[jmitchell]

We have also finished an implementation of about 20-Spectralink 8020 phones. We had to install a SVP server at each site. Once that was installed the phones use the SVP as their proxy and everything works great. They did not function properly in straight SIP mode for us, transfer sometimes worked, intermittent ringing.