I’ve started playing with DIY VOIP installations recently. Last time I was back in the US, I picked up a hardware IP Phone and an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) to experiment with. For the hardware phone, I picked the Sipura SPA-841 based on features and reviews. <\/p>\n
Yesterday I took it out of the box and started playing with it. First, I got it working with Free World Dialup<\/a> which went OK once I figured out that STUN is broken in the firmware I had, 0.9.1. I upgraded the phone to the new 3.1.3a firmware and after that it was fine. Then I configured it to use an Asterisk (Linux PBX software) server I’d set up. Had some problems with that, but it turns out it was because I hadn’t applied my changes on the Asterisk server. Oops.<\/p>\n That’s when things started going downhill fast. First the microphone started getting flaky. When making calls, I could only be heard if shouting straight into the microphone. While debugging this, I was dialing an FWD number when the phone just froze up completely. When I power cycled it, it came back up but froze again less than a minute later. After a few rounds of this, it started booting up less and less frequently. I was able to do a Factory Reset once, but that didn’t help any. <\/p>\n Worried that it was the new firmware that was flaky, I downgraded to an older version, 0.9.5. (I couldn’t find my original firmware version available for download, so that’s as close as I could get.) The phone was getting increasingly flaky now, but I was able to just squeeze in a successful firmware downgrade. That didn’t help either. At this point it has degraded to the point where it rarely boots up anymore.<\/p>\n While looking around the web, a saw that this guy<\/a> and this guy<\/a> have had similar difficulties with this model. The latter actually performed a postmortem autopsy which shows the fairly low quality of the phone’s manufacture.<\/p>\n Sipura refers support requests to the reseller, so I’m waiting to see what the place I bought it from suggests. Regardless, it’ll probably involve international shipping to send it in for repair which will be expensive and slow.<\/p>\n Sipura was recently bought by Cisco, so hopefully quality will start to improve, but for now it’s probably best to avoid this model.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve started playing with DIY VOIP installations recently. Last time I was back in the US, I picked up a hardware IP Phone and an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) to experiment with. For the hardware phone, I picked the Sipura SPA-841 based on features and reviews. Yesterday I took it out of the box and … Continue reading “Sipura SPA-841 Problems”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jameslick.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}