Cordless Phon
e for Business Phone System
What business wouldn’t like a cordless phone or two attached as an extension on their corporate phone system? In the past, this has been expensive and difficult. However, times have changed! Most hybrid phone systems these days have the option of adding 3rd party SIP endpoints. This is one the best ways to get a fully functional cordless extension connected.
Cordless Phones on Last Generation Phone Systems
Nortel’s heritage, for example, includes a cordless phone model for their CICS/MICS/BCM telephone systems. The downsides of the T7406 and T7406e included:
- poor battery life
- easily broken when dropped
- proprietary technology – it could not be used on other phone systems
- limited range
- high price – typically over $1,000 to have one installed
Avaya also had a cordless phone called the D160 for their IP Office phone system. Unfortunately, it suffered many of the same drawbacks the Nortel cordlesses used to have and has since been discontinued.
Avaya still has what they call the “DECT R4” cordless phone series, but it is even more expensive and complex to administer.
Panasonic featured a number of cordless phones over the years, and most worked quite well. The biggest problem Panasonic customers faced was the rate at which the cordless phones became obsolete.
Other manufacturers would likely have experienced a combination of the challenges we’ve mentioned so far.
Current Cordless Phone Solution for Phone Systems
If your phone system has VoIP capability, chances are decent that it will be able to support 3rd party SIP devices! For example, the Yealink T73H cordless phone registered to an Avaya IP Office performed will on our test bench. Functionality was great and special functions, such as Call Park, worked as expected. The device ended up with it’s own extension number and was able to Answer, Transfer, and Place calls with ease. Surprisingly, even the voice call function worked! The advantages of this setup are:
- savings – 3rd party SIP cordless phones tend to be a fraction of the cost
- your investment in cordless hardware can be transferred to a different phone system or even a cloud phone system
- replacement parts should be much easier to obtain
- bigger selection – there are even ruggedized models available
- better multi-cell support
Clearly we have a new path forward!