SNOM 300 - any good?

They apparently have a good reputation, but personally I prefer ATA's and normal phones.

Ivor

At a wonderful price I would want at least three for the price Voipfone are charging for them, wouldn't have one given anyway sooner have a cordless and freedom to move around .

I don't know if I am your voip provider, but, personally, I have one in my sitting room @ home, and yes, it's a wonderful phone. It's well built, reasonably priced and does everything you might expect.

cheers peter

I can't tell you anything about the Snom 300, but after my experiences with the Snom 190, I would not consider buying any other Snom products. I bought it at is was brand new on the market, I think some 18 months ago. Since then, Snom has managed to remove exisiting functionality from the firmware (UPnP support), introduce bugs in other functions (STUN) and cease software support 6 months after they stopped selling the unit. Without UPnP support and with broken STUN functionality, it is impossible to operate the unit behind an assymetric NAT router (symetric routers are not affected by the STUN bug).

Another oddity was, that the phone was delivered brand new with a broken firmware, so that it for some reason crashed when being able to reach the internet. It was no problem operating it in my local network, but as soon as the phone could "reach further", it crashed. Firmware updates are not done by uploading the new firmware to the telephone, but telling it the URL for the new firmware. Telling the phone to download new firmware from Snom's web pages tended to be rather difficult, when the phone crashed when in contact with the internet. I had to download the firmware update manually, setup a local web server and tell the phone to download from there.

After that, the software still had a few annoying bugs, dial plans did not work, a lot of features and functionality available on the configuration pages were not documented properly and so on, but right now the unit is at least more or less working and I have learned that paying twice the price for a thingy compared to a far east cheapy product is not necessarily a guarantee for a quality product.

Tor

To be fair to them, the firmware has improved enormously in the last 18 months, and the 3NN series phones are much better than the 1NN series.

cheers peter

UPnP is a waste of time because it is so poorly implemented on most routers. Most router manufacturers make UPnP, test it with MSN messenger and declare it working.

I'm rather glad it isn't in the Snom phones anymore because it just used to cause support hassles.

Because of the way the Snom190 was made, Snom had to drop it quite quickly. There is nothing wrong with a Snom190 with the last firmware, but there will be no further development.

The 3xx phones are a lot better.

You are the only person to report problems like this with a Snom190.

If you buy a phone through an ITSP then the (minimum) firmware version will be setup already.

Most people who just buy phones want to be able to mess around with the settings as they wish, and so don't want any particular firmware version prescribed.

Tim

As I said, there is a bug in the STUN support. The firmware mixes up the public IP address with the local port number, causing inboud RTP packets not to be forwarded if the phone is behind a router using assymetric NAT. If you are in any way related to Snom (it sounds like you are), you can probably find the unresolved ticket with logs of the incorrect SIP traffic in the Snom ticket database.

Tor