Grandstream GXP2160 IP Phone

This phone is awesome! I decided to go off on a limb one day and built a phone system using FreePBX for my office. I looked around at phones for a while, took a look at Cisco because they’re so common in other offices, and even took a look at some Android desk phones. For the price I couldn’t find anything that had so much value as the Grandstream. The color screen is nice, (though the view angle could be a bit better), and there are a lot of buttons you can program etc.

It has an adjustable stand, and it also wall-mountable!

Probably what I love most is that this phone has Bluetooth. I can hook up my little Plantronics headset up and pace around the office and get things done while I’m on the phone.

Since I bought this phone, I also bought one of the lower models that has a smaller screen and less buttons, but it works great as well!

returned it. As I couldn’t connect Vonage

I think this phone is fantastic. First, I needed to connect to different SIP systems simultaneously (so far connected RingCentral, Telzio). The 2130 version would have been fine, but I went all out and get support for six for testing and use functions.

It has a web interface via http:// that makes setup extremely quick and simple.

Phone is responsive, has good sound, I like the tactile qualities of it, and overall nice features. My last sip phone was a 3Com from the prior decade; this is a large improvement.

I run FreePBX in the cloud and have multiple phone number I use. In order to dial out from one of those numbers, I had to dial 9, 8, or some other combination of digits. I decided on the Grandstream GS-GXP2160 because it offers 6 SIP connections, the color display, and some various customization.

Once I received the package, I was up and running in minutes. You can configure the phone via the telephone’s keypad or via web interface. I opted for the web interface. I set up all 4 of my extensions and say they went green. Calling out was no problem, but I ran into my first hiccup. I couldn’t receive calls. I opened up RTP ports 10001-20000 and SIP ports 5060-5061 to the phone. Now I was able to dial out, but from only one extension. I found that each account was assigned every other next available SIP port. Account 1 had 5060, account 2 had 5062, account 3 had 5064, and so on. I extended the range of forwarded SIP ports from 5060-5061 to 5060-5070 and that solved it.

I continued setting up the phone and changed the time zone, set some wallpaper, and configured the weather. Getting the weather configured was a bit tricky. You need to look up your self defined city code. To find this you need to head to The Weather Channel and search for your City, State. It cannot be done by zip code. When you load the weather page for your City, State, in the URL there will be a code. For Redlands, CA it is USCA0923. Copy that code and paste it in the phone’s configuration and it will instantly update the weather information. To view the forecast, push the first button on the home row left of missed calls.

I poked around the other settings to see if there’s anything else I needed to configure or customize, but didn’t see anything that I needed to change so I called it good.

Last night I did get hit with another gotcha. The phone kept ringing and it was from an extension which doesn’t exist on my system. Some have called these ghost calls. What is happening is it is a hacker scanning your network and seeing if they can take advantage of any vulnerabilities on your system. I did some reading and found the solution is to enable Check Accept Incoming SIP from Proxy Only under Accounts > Account # > SIP Settings > Security Settings. I also enabled Check SIP User ID for Incoming INVITE. Another solution would to be to use non-standard SIP ports. But after making that change, I haven’t received another Ghost Call.

Perfetto