My Experience using a SNOM 870 IP Phone

Since I have been doing VoIP for a long time now, I think it is a good idea starting to write my experience about using some IP phones. When I talk to people, I always refer myself to this phone as my "trusty SNOM"; in the 4 years I have had it, I can say it has not failed me a single time. With this said, I will talk more about my experience, you can find the tech spec by googling it.

This is the phone I have on my desk for daily use.

First the bad news, this phone has been out of the market for about 3 years. If you want to get one, you will need to get from eBay, Amazon but you will not get it from SNOM directly. 

Physical Overview

The phone is big enough, it has a 4 inches screen which it is a touch screen. If you have the enough patient to read the documentation, you will be able to change the graphics.

On the back, it has a USB port. Usually, you can plug a USB stick there to add WiFi capabilities. I have never done it, I prefer the wire. The phone works as a bridge, so you can share a single wire with your desktop computer.

The quality of the sound is very good using the speaker or the headset.

Software Overview

Another thing you must know is that this phone has Linux inside, an old one, but it is still Linux. It has a native OpenVPN client which you can connect to your VPN server. It is a little difficult to setup the VPN client. You must do a very specific TAR file with some files with specific names. The good side of this is that this VPN setup process is very well documented. Because of its Linux nature, it also supports QoS marking and SNMP.

The phone is very NAT friendly. I have seen its success where other brands are failing. It is compatible with ICE and it has a NAT keep-alive option to allow incoming calls after a long time of inactivity.

The WEB interface supports many things. In my experience, I have had zero issues dealing with it and FreeSWITCH. It has many options to deal with SIP and RTP protocol, but the default settings should work out of the box for a regular installation.

The phone has some debug options, this means it can help you debugging the SIP and DNS protocol. For example, you can flush the DNS cache, send information to a Syslog server or do a TCP capture.

This awesome phone has a lot of hook-ups. You can call specific HTTP URL based on actions. For example, if you want to sync the DND button with the DND status in the PBX, this capability will be very useful.

The provisioning is very documented. It is supported by FusionPBX and documentation to add more things is very clear.

If you have one of this, do not trash it. Use it!