Cirrus CPH-B661 Ethernet VoIP Phone

I’ve recently bought one of these devices from eBay, for a mere 70$. Bargin basement, considering the cost of an ATA is 70$, plus the cost of a phone, and that many other IP Phones sell for 300-400$, and I wasn’t willing to spend that much money on a phone.

It’s a nice gadget, it has a “straight through” RJ-45 100mbit socket, and a crossover socket, allowing you to use an existing cable for your computer for your phone as well - something ideal in offices or other situations where there is limited cabling and you want to save money on VoIP rollout.

There are five different firmwares for the device: H.323, IAX2, MGCP, Net2Phone, and SIP. By default, my unit had a SIP firmware on it, however it is painlessly switchable by downloading the firmware from Cirrus’ website, then uploading it via a web interface. It takes about 5 minutes to complete the update. Something interesting about the images is that the filesystem isn’t encrypted or encrapted at all - and you can see the raw HTML source in the file, as well as some of the strings used on the phone. Initial minipulation hasn’t really been successful, however I could be in the wrong place, or there may be a checksum on the file to prevent modified or corrupted firmware from being uploaded to the device.

A couple of issues I had was that I found the manual difficult to follow to configure the device via the handset. After I switched the device to using DHCP (it was using a static IP of 192.168.1.100 by default), it then was trivial to configure via a web interface.

Something I noticed using the original firmware that when reading out the “index” of the speed dial, that the numbers weren’t really right. So for number “98”, it would read “9 ten 8”. In v1.50 of the firmware, this issue was resolved.

I notice you can set a “phone number” to be displayed on the phone as any string you wish using the web interface, but not the handset. I actually use this functionality (it simply pops up that it’s my phone), and then it displays my local extension number. It would be good if that sort of thing was consistant.

The “Flash” button doesn’t do a “flash” (or “recall”) at all, but in fact accesses an interactive speed dial menu. Additionally, the abbreviations for some of the buttons could be better (“anscal”, “miscal”, “diacal”), and there should be some functionality to change the ringing, and dialtone, much like the Sipura ATA units do.

So, we shall see how this all goes....