Posts from Onsip

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:

Panasonic sip phones

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.

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How A Little Hack Can Be Lifechanging

One of the things I love about mobile browsers is they recognize phone numbers and activate them. You search for a store on your mobile phone, you find the phone number, you click on it, and you place the call.

I've always wanted to work like that at home, but I really don't like calling on my laptop. I love the ability to roam around my home or office with my mobile phone or cordless phone and as much as I love my laptop, it makes a lousy phone.

On Thursday I posted about voice in the cloud and SIP phones. And Ken Berger left this comment letting us know about a Firefox extension for OnSip.

I installed the Firefox extension on my laptop yesterday morning and now every phone number I come across in Firefox is activated just like in my mobile browser. When I click on the number, my wireless SIP phone rings, I pick up the call, and I am connected. I can walk around my home and do the call just like I was on my cell phone.

This is a little hack. It wasn't a huge amount of effort for OnSip to build this extension and the extension has only been downloaded 902 times as of this morning at the Firefox add on service. So in the grand scheme of things, this isn't a big game changing web service.

But it is a lifechanger for me. It simplifies making calls and makes the wired experience mimic the mobile one.

All of this is possible when your phone becomes a device on your network and the Internet just like your computer. As I said yesterday, this convergence is a big deal.

As Ken said in another comment, "Fones are finally fun."

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