Hands-on with the Quickphone QA-342 Wifi Phone

I have been slowly replacing the old analog phones around my house with some nitfy IP phones. Since I am someone that doesn't like to get too tied down by one vendor, I am using a variety of different phones. (Okay, to be fair, it isn't just a one vendor issue. It is also phones that I can get cheap. ;)

To that end, I have replaced my office phone with a Cisco 7960, the phone in my basement with a Polycom 501, and the phone in my kitchen with a Budgetone (model number escapes me at the moment.) All of these phones are tied to my Asterisk box running in the basement.

At this point, there is only one set of phones in my house that are not IP based. Those would be the old stand-by cordless phones that are probably the second most used phones in the house.

Some time ago, I picked up one of the D-Link "flip-phone" SIP phones. (Model DPH-540, IIRC.) The phone worked surprisingly well for a gen 1 wifi phone. The range was great, the sound was good, but the battery was so horrible that the phone was only usable as a toy. Cordless phones around my house can sit out of their charging station for days (sometimes weeks) without being put back. Needless to say, the D-Link was never charged when I wanted to use it.

So, I started to look around to see what other options were out there. My criteria were somewhat simple. The phone needed to have a significant stand-by time, several days at a minimum. Obviously the phone needed to work with some form of secure SSID, WPA-Enterprise would be great, but I would settle for WPA-PSK.

After some digging, I came up with two phones that looked like they would do what I needed. They were the Quickphones QA-342, and the Unidata WPU7700. I managed to track down the Quickphones for about $130, while the best price I could find on the Unidata was $160. So, I decided to go with the Quickphones.

My goal was that this blog post would be a short entry, made about 7 days after the phone arrived. The D-Link had shown me that there are stable wifi SIP stacks out there, so I assumed that the main thing I would looking at with the Quickphones was the battery life.

Boy, was I wrong! The first problem I ran in to was right out of the box. When I scanned for wireless networks, nothing showed up. This seemed insane to me, since there are a HUGE number of wireless networks in my area. (My house alone probably has 12 SSIDs!!!) After messing with the phone for a while, I did manage to see one or two SSIDs every now and then, but never the SSIDs I wanted to use.

In past years, I have worked with the Interop iLabs people on wireless related demos for the shows in Las Vegas and New York. So, I knew that many wireless implementations have silly restrictions on the size of the scan buffer. So, I decided to pair down the number of SSIDs that the phone could see. First, I turned off all of the wireless in my house. After a reboot, the phone could now see all of my neighbors wireless networks! So, I paired down the list of SSIDs I was broadcasting in my house to just the 4 that I needed to use the most.

I rebooted the phone, thinking I had solved the problem, and again, I saw no scan data. So, I hopped over to the Quickphones site to check that my firmware was up to date. There were two firmwares available on their site. However, version 4 required a license key, so I fired an e-mail off to the Quickphones folks to see if I qualified for the upgrade, and then loaded version 3 on my phone.

Version 3 made no difference. I still couldn't see my SSIDs in the scan. Since I had read of some of the reviews about the phone that it had issues with multiple APs on the same SSID, I shut down all of the radios in my house except the one that was nearest to me. Surprisingly enough, the phone could now see the network, connect to it, and make a call. Thinking that it might be some weirdness in the software that prevented the initial setup when multiple APs were around, I turned the other APs back on, and rebooted the phone. After the reboot, the phone just bounced between scanning, and joining.

The next day, I checked my e-mail and found that the Quickphones people had responded to my initial e-mail within an hour of my sending it. (Downright amazing if you ask me. I can't tell you how many companies have ignored e-mails from me!) In the e-mail was the code I needed to upgrade to version 4. So, I quickly loaded up version 4, did a master reset, and a fresh scan.

My SSIDs show up this time! Life was finally going to be good! So, I attempted to connect to the SSID, but wasn't able to. Every time I put the key in, it complained that it was incorrect. So, I shut down all but one of the APs again, and connected. That method still worked at least!

Once I had done this, I went in to the settings, and turned on the new setting for multiple AP support. I then turned my other APs back on. The phone remained connected to the AP that I was sitting next to! Life again, seemed to be looking up. So, I rebooted the phone to see what would happen. After the reboot, the phone went between scanning and network down mode a few times, then switched to joining, and proceeded to sit there on that screen for a good half hour.

At this point, I am starting to run out of ideas. It is unclear to me if the issue I am running in to is multiple APs, or if it is some incompatibility with the Trapeze wireless gear that I am using. Fortunately, I have a small pile of wireless gear sitting around my house, so I should be able to narrow it down. In the mean time, I am going to also launch a pre-emptive e-mail to the Quickphones folks and see if they are aware of this issue, and if I can help them figure out what it wrong.


More as it develops.....