IP Phone AT-530 - Review

Looking for a cheap SIP IP phone handset? Then you should consider the AT-530 as an option. It has many advanced features usually not found in such a cheap phone and sometimes not even in the more expensive ones.

Here are the features that I find the most useful:

1. Two Ethernet jacks.
2. Can register to two SIP services.
   
3. Simple Dial plan - ie setup different SIP providers for different number ranges, including adding and removing prefixes. No need to dial international number format for local calls when using international SIP providers. If you had several handsets you could setup a basic office without any PBX,. eg Dial 101 and using dial plan set it to to go straight to IP address of another handset.
   
4. Loud and clear handset and handsfree.

There are also some other features that are good if you need them (I don't currently use them)

1. IAX2 protocol support (easier protocol when connecting through firewalls to an Asterisk PBX).
2. Power-over-Ethernet - if your Ethernet switch supports it, relieves you of the power adapter at the phone.

So what is bad about the phone? Well it mostly comes down to aesthetics and certain minor things. It is a light handset, and I find the cord a bit short, so the base will move if you stretch it a bit too far. There is a network status light on the front of the phone, this is so not required for telephone functions, it should be on the actual network port as we are used to on laptops etc.

Installation and Configuration

• Installation is easy, just plug it in to your Ethernet, and power.
• DHCP on your network should give it an IP address.
• Press the SYS key on the phone, and it will show you the IP address that it is using. Enter this into a web browser and connect to the phone web configuration interface. See the Quick Start Guide (pdf) for more details.
• The first thing you should do, is to make sure that you are running the latest firmware. My phone had V1.0 when it arrived, and IAX2 was not actually an option until I updated the firmware.

I use this phone as an extra phone line, I use sipme.com.au for local Untimed calls in Australia for 9.9c (with no monthly plan, beat that engin), I also use gizmoproject.com to provide SIP federation (when calling to and from other SIP services).

More info can be found at:
http://voip-info.org/wiki/view/AT-530
http://www.atcom.cn (Manufacturer site for manual, firmware, support forum)

openSUSE 10.2 on Acer Aspire 1681 WMLi

Installation is trouble free. Some things to note are:

1. openSUSE has Xorg V7.2. and the latest video drivers from ATI only support 7.1, if you want 3D acceleration (ie XGL), you will need to follow the instructions on this page: http://en.opensuse.org/ATI_Driver (or wait for ATI to update their driver).
   
2. This laptop has a buggy DSDT (battery indication will be broken) but can be fixed as follows:
   

• Download the fixed and compiled DSDT file (only use this file on an Aspire 1681WMLi) from here:DSDT.aml and place in /etc/acpi/
• Update /etc/sysconfig/kernel with the path to the DSDT file:
  ACPI_DSDT="/etc/acpi/DSDT.aml"
• Run: mkinitrd and Reboot.

If you have a similar model (but not identical) follow the instructions here, to create your own DSDT file (that's how I created it). Note that you don't need to recompile the kernel to get battery indication working, as described on that page.

Don't GTalk the talk if you can't GWalk the walk.

Google is claiming that anyone can now talk. Come on Google! How could anybody claim such nonsense.

I expected an announcement that a Mac and Linux client had been released and special mesh network version was to be included in the One Laptop per Child project.

We can only hope that Google Talk will announce the following, so that they can make a new post with the same title that will be closer to the truth:
1. Finally release native clients for Mac and Linux. Saying that they will, is just teasing.
2. Support SIP. As I posted over a year ago in this blog (the post is not hard to find), I believe that this will be what turns Google Talk into a killer app.

Now imagine further into the future, the Google Search appliances are extended and introduce Google Office Appliance - a device that provides search (obviously), SIP PBX/Gateway, provides a local cache of the Google Spreadsheets, Writely etc, for persistence and high-performance.

So I say again. Come on Google Give us the choices that you talk about.

Or is it just talk....