Well, my firm moved into a new building 4 months ago, and we got these fancy new VOIP phones. They are not perfect, but they work pretty well for the most part.
Towards the beginning of those 4 months we had a few firm-wide outages that lasted an hour or two each. Not good. I don't know what the problem was, but they seemed to be getting the bugs out. Now the phones are pretty reliable.
I was told by the head of our phone department that these phones are something like $200-$300 each. Cisco IP Phone 7940 Series. That's amazing to me. I am using a 4 year old computer, so that means my phone costs more than my PC does. Nevermind that my phones at home were $20-$80 each.
I can check the news and weather on the LCD screen on the phone. I changed the ringtone to an old bell style ring. So it has lots of bells and whistles. I don't really need bells and whistles.
When my wife calls me from just across the river in another state, the sound is sometimes kind of hollow at first, like talking in a storm pipe. Then it's normal again. Otherwise, it's OK.
So I guess the verdict is still out on these phones. The reliability is a real issue.
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