DECT / Wireless phone for home use on 3300?

[Steve_zvc]

Having had almost everyone working from home for the last 6 months and now for at least the near future the business are taking more of a look at how they can improve phone quality from home.

At present most staff are connecting to a virtual desktop then using a headset and soft phone through MiCollab 7.3.

Call quality is generally ok but users do get issues where calls drop or quality isn't as good.  Whether these issues are down to our phone system or there Internet connection I'm not 100% sure.  Definitely some issues are down to their Internet quality.

I use a deskphone (5320) from home via external gateway and this works perfectly well and I've never or at least very rarely seen any issue.

The only issue with the desk phones is that they rely on hard wiring near the router or via a powerline adaptor.  This isn't a major issue but this might not be practical for a lot of people that don't have a decent home set up.

We've been asked to look into DECT /Wireless phones and I wondered if anyone had any experience with using these remotely on a 3300?  And importantly can they be used for ACD calls?

Other than that does anyone have any suggestions on improving reliability of soft phones, any setting tweaks etc that may help?

We are looking at upgrading our MiVoice/MiCollab versions in the coming months, I know the Ignite/MiCollab look to have been completely rebuilt and these may well improve functionality if not reliability/stability so that is something I will be looking forward to testing.

[Dogbreath]

You need to investigate network quality first. It doesn't matter what hardphone or softphone you're using, if the network is lossy, jittery or has high latency, call quality will suffer.

[rgardeck]

Following this one.....

Yes, we too are still working remotely. I completely agree that not all homes are setup for hardwired phones.
I, for example, bought a 100ft Ethernet cable to fun from my router in the basement, way up to the 2nd floor office space.
Not ideal is most circumstances.
I am a network guy, but keeping my router in the basement is still the best option for me at this time.

I briefly looked into the wireless adapters for our 6940 IP phones, but the cost, at least at the time, was too high for our requirements.

Now, seeing that we may still be home for the remainder of the year, have been asked again to look into the wireless adapters.
I would love to know if anyone has had experience with these and can give some feedback.

[Dogbreath]

We've been asked to look into DECT /Wireless phones and I wondered if anyone had any experience with using these remotely on a 3300?  And importantly can they be used for ACD calls?

They're going to be SIP, whether it's a DECT base with a built-in ATA, or two boxes.

In the online help, SIP devices are not listed in "Sets that support ACD" or the list of devices under "Hot desk ACD agents are only supported on the following devices: ...".

[dg]

I have one setup like this - a real backwards work-around - but actually works quite well. The guy working from home doesn't have any hardwires available, and he also happened to need a work PC as well as the phone. So I set up a PC for him to be used on his xfinity wireless at home, then used Windows ICS to share that wireless connection to the ethernet port. (Yeah, that's double NAT, and it's backwards, but it works.) The phone is a teleworker, so it finds its way through the computer and home router to the MBG just fine and sounds good. This is tricky to get right, and there's a reg hack required to have the ICS stay on after shutdown or reboot, but it can be done.

The other option I had considered was to just use an old wireless router as a bridge, but then I'd have needed his home credentials and I couldn't be sure it would work.

Cheers,
-dg

[Dogbreath]

If it works through ICS on a PC, then basically any wireless client bridge should work.