We recently received an email from a customer debating the pros and cons of Polycom vs Aastra telephones. They were going to begin using Polycom telephones but one employee brought up his poor past experiences with Polycom and pushed for Aastra.
He shared three reasons he preferred Aastra telephones:
- Autoprovision – handsfree, fire and forget setups – reduces time and increases customer satisfaction
- Ease of use – as above
- Robust
In his experience, Polycom was slow and cumbersome – taking too long to reboot between changes and lacking an extensible interface to extend the functionality of the telephone.
They asked us for some advice on the benefits of Polycom phones. We responded with the following:
Polycom changed a lot with firmware v4.x. You should trial that first.
It can now update ‘some’ of its configuration without rebooting. For instance, if you send a SIP NOTIFY packet, it will re-download the config files and not require full reboot (this depends on which options are changed).
There is also a new web interface (although I do not recommend to use it in combination with auto provisioning) which allows for the modification of almost all options (previously this was not the case).
Yes, it is more complex. You need to read its Admin guide from beginning to the end to truly understand the concept.
Sure, they still boot slowly and you may have some trouble until you set it up, but it is the type of device that once you setup, you don’t tweak around constantly. It is not a perfect ‘dev’ device (where you have to constantly add/remove accounts etc).
See also: Our Verdict on Polycom & our Polycom Products