Andy Abramson responded to my post about IP phones being too big with a comment that they take a major geek to configure. I'd go a step further and say even geeks don't want to configure the damn things.

A few years ago, the way I "earned my stripes" in the VoIP community was figuring out the idiosyncrasies of configuring Sipura (now Linksys) analog telephone adapters (ATAs) and IP Phones. In fact, I used that information in order to designed the first versions of Voxilla's Device Configuration Wizards and provided countless hours of assistance on Voxilla's Forums. It got extended to Grandstream and Leadtek devices as well.

I eventually got burned out on trying to keep up with all the service providers and twiddly knobs the device manufacturers concocted. I burned out to the point where I have, for the most part, refused to touch either an IP phone or a PBX for the past couple of years. These days, I pretty much stick to Skype. It doesn't have too many fiddly knobs and it just works.

If you're trying to implement IP phones in their small-medium business: how do you configure and maintain all these IP phones? Chances are, you don't have an IT staff to do this work for you and you lack the expertise to configure the equipment. Linksys has by far the most secure and flexible methods for configuring devices and maintaining their configuration. However, it takes a rocket scientist to set it all up.

So here's my idea, IP PBX makers. Feel free to steal it. Put an Ethernet port on your hardware that is dedicated only to configuring IP phones or ATAs. When the device is plugged in, the IP PBX recognizes the device and does whatever device-dependent steps are necessary to make the device's configuration controlled by the IP PBX. Then the administrator takes the IP device off this special Ethernet port and plugs it into the main network.

Now there are some steps the admin will have to undertake first, including entering the MAC address (or other identifying information) into the IP PBX so it knows which devices goes with which extension. But that's fairly trivial compared to the alternatives.

At least of what I've read of the talkswitch documentation, configuring IP phones for their product is nowhere near as simple as it could be. If they supported Linksys IP phones, then it would be trivial to implement the auto-configuration system I described above. Even without that, they could even implement something similar to the Voxilla Device Configuration Wizards and end up with something far less fiddly.

I'd also put a call out to the device manufacturers themselves to make configuring your devices something that doesn't require a PhD in SIP to configure. Last I checked, Leadtek's devices had by far the least complicated configuration screens, but even those, in my opinion, were too complicated for most people. Linksys devices provide every conceivable configuration option under the sun, which is enough to make even my eyes glaze over.

I am with Andy Abramson on this one-configuring IP phones has to be a plug it in, turn it on, push the "configure" button and be done. Right now, it's nowhere near that simple and it doesn't need to be.

© Dave Bullock / eecue