Panasonic KX-TGP500: A Great Wireless SIP Phone
I've written a bit about our move from landline telephony to VOIP telephony in our family. We use a cloud based VOIP PBX called Onsip and we have ported all of our land lines to their cloud based system. We have several homes on one Onsip account and our total phone bill including international calls, across multiple homes, is generally $100/month or less. It's fantastic.
But we have struggled to find the perfect phone handsets. We like wireless handsets that have a small charging cradle and nothing else. We sometimes connect headsets to them and sometimes not.
We've tried a bunch of vendors but this spring we finally landed on the answer. It's a Panasonic DECT system called the KX-TGP500. It looks like this:
The black box is called a gateway and that is what you connect to your home network. It connects via the Internet to your SIP provider, in our case Onsip. It's about the size of a CD jewel case and it sits easily underneath a desk somewhere. The handsets connect wirelessly to the gateway.
The range is very good. We get good connectivity a floor up and down and throughout a 3000sf space.
The handsets look nice, are not too large, and have good build quality. And they appear to be very reliable, although we've only been using them for four or five months. You can get additional handsets for the gateway.
Here's a review of the system I found on Amazon. I agree with it completely:
3 simultaneous calls and up to 6 cordless handsets, perfect for small business or home office.
Range and call quality is amazing. All the basic features: Speakerphone, Transfer, Intercom, Message Waiting Indicator, etc.
Setup was easy, since our VoIP provider (voiSip) was able to do it remotely in about 2 minutes.
If you have a VOIP provider and are looking for a new SIP phone, I strongly recommend this Panasonic phone. If you are still on a traditional land line carrier and are getting bilked, I strongly suggest you go VOIP.
