Voicespan

The Atcom AT-530 arrived late last week, and my initial impression was that it would not look out of place on the typical office desk. It uses a decent quality plastic and the design is in no way offensive, if a bit safe. However, at a typical retail price of about £50 (excl VAT), I wasn’t expecting a rival to Band & Olufsen.

Once you take it out of the box and start putting it together, though, you start to notice a few, errmmm, ‘quirks’. For a start, the handset cable is quite short. Now this wouldn’t be an issue normally, but the phone itself is very light for a desk phone, so you quickly find that if you pull the handset more than about a foot or so from the phone, then rather than the cable unravelling, the phone itself follows you around ! I can see this alone being a major gripe for a lot of office workers, although investing in some sticky pads for the feet may resolve it quickly and cheaply. Otherwise, you may need to replace the handset cable for a longer one.

Another minor gripe is the lack of backlighting for the display which may cause issues in tricky lighting situations, although that is assuaged somewhat by the utilisation of a large clear font. My biggest gripe about the display, though, is that it does not seem possible to amend the standard text on the top line. I would much rather it could be configured to show the name or extension number of the person at that desk instead of just ‘VOIP PHONE’.

Initial setup turned out to be trickier that it should have been, although I will admit that some of that was most definitely my fault. My first mistake was in assuming that the LAN port should be hooked up to the voice switch, and not the WAN port. Like many IP phones the Atcom will allow you to daisy-chain your PC off the back of it, and this is achieved by having a 2-port switch built in to the phone itself. A little bit of thought on my part would have made it apparent that the PC should hook up to the LAN port and the switch to the WAN port. However, this wouldn’t have been a problem if it hadn’t been for an unlikely co-incidence. My test network runs in the 192.168.10.x subnet, and this just so happens to be the subnet that the LAN side of the Atcom’s switch tries to utilise too. So once the phone was hooked up both it and my router were trying to use the 192.168.10.1 address. The WAN side is happy to use DHCP to allocate an initial address, as you would imagine.

Once I figured that issue out, I was able to access the web configuration page for the phone, and boy do you get a lot of options here !

• LAN config is pretty straightforward, with options for IP addredd config, bridging, NAT and also the ability to act as a DHCP server.
• WAN config allows you to set a static IP (useful if you run your own PBX), use DHCP, or use PPPoE. You can also spoof the MAC address if needs be.
• SIP config is pretty straightforward, and a nice touch is that if the address is the same for server, proxy and realm then you need only enter it once (in the server field) and it is automatically used in the other fields. Bit confusing if you’re not expecting it, though. In another screen you can configure a second SIP server for failover capabilities.
• IAX config, the main reason I wanted to try this phone as I will be using it with a Concordiax Asterisk server, is again quite straightforward. One thing to be aware of, though, is you need to tick the ‘IAX(Default Protocol)’ box or the phone will try to use SIP for outgoing calls. This may well confuse your PBX.
• Time Set config allows you to set up the phone to pull the date/time from an NTP server. I use one of the uk.pool.ntp.org servers which do the job perfectly well. However, it looks like you may have to manually set when you’re using daylight savings time on the phone, which has the potential to be quite painful in a larger organisation.

There are other switch-related settings, such as firewall, NAT, VPN and Q0S (utilising 802.1p). Indeed, just looking at the web config you could be forgiven for thinking the device is a router with some VoIP capability rather than the other way around. It certainly looks feasible for the phone to be used as a simple router/firewall for a small network such as a branch office.

Additional features include digit mapping (so the phone knows when to send the digits to the PBX), call forward, DND, auto-answer, hotline, blacklist, limit list and others. Although some of these features you would probably set on your PBX. The AT-530 also has a phonebook as well as 9 configurable speeddial keys for those frequentl-used numbers, and also have the usual configuration management options. You can provision the phone manually using the phone keys, Telnet or HTTP. There is also an option to provision using FTP/TFTP or a configuration server.

Once I’d got my head around that lot it was time to hook it up to my Asterisk server. I tried using SIP first, and after a bit of to-ing and fro-ing (all my fault again !) it was there. Everything worked as expected and incoming/outgoing calls were made. I didn’t spend too much time checking out SIP before I set up an IAX extension in Asterisk and configured the phone to use IAX instead. It connected quickly and easily, althought I did have an issues with outgoing calls for a while. This I eventually traced to the ‘Use IAX as the default protocol’ setting, meaning that the phone was trying to use SIP for outbound calls even though it was hooked up to the PBX via IAX. I ticked the relevant box and all was OK.

In the few calls I have made so far, call quality has been good, although there was a couple of hiccups on a call to a mobile in a noisy environment. The phone’s mic and speaker seem up to the job in handsfree mode without being startlingly good, but I will need to use the phone for a while yet to get a better feel for call quality, and will blog on my results then. There is no port for a headset.

Finally, one other gripe…the lack of a message waiting indicator. The phone will tell you on the display if you have missed an incoming call, but it would be nice if there was a flashing or solid light to tell you there was a message too. You preference may be different, but for me this is a big omission. (see the update at the end of the review for more on MWI)

In conclusion, the Atcom AT-530 is priced as an entry-level IP phone, and despite some nice features (not least of which is IAX support) it is difficult to consider it as anything beyond a cheap and cheerful option. However, if all you require is a basic desk phone, then it’s definitely worth a look.

UPDATE: I believe it is possible to configure MWI with this phone, but the documentation is, shall we say, challenging (seems like a direct translation from Chinese to English at times) so I am having problems getting it to work.

UPDATE 2: I have written a follow-up to this review here.