IP Office / J-129 phone 4

[poopus]

We are in the process of upgrading our current CS1000. Avaya has a promotion on IP Office. They are discounting the system and proving free J-129 phones with each IP license. We are evaluating now. A couple questions; how does everyone feel about IP Office and it's future in next 5 to 10 years? Anyone know about these J-129 phones? They look pretty entry level. The display is very small and some question on what the display shows on a call. Any information or input will be greatly appreciated.

Carl Knoll
LTU

 

[janni78]

IP Offices are installed every day so it should stick around for years to come, but things change quick so who knows.
If you're buying a PBX then your guess is as good as mine regarding which brand will be here in 5-10 years.

I would stay away from the J-129 though, as you say the are entry level.

"Trying is the first step to failure..." - Homer

 

[biv343]

J129s are a good replacement for an analog phone or lobby/house phone. I wouldn't give them to users who require multiple buttons or features.

As far as IPO, it's a current product well supported in the Avaya lifecycle. As janni said, in the IT industry its hard to say what will be around in 5-10 years with all the mergers and acquisitions that seem to happen.

 

[sizbut]

Remember the expressions "If its too good to be true..." and "There's no such thing as a free lunch".

Staff who need anything beyond the basics (make call/answer call/transfer) won't thank you. They don't have access to the system directory and no programmable buttons.

That said, the build quality is sound and the sound quality is good, so as general phones as biv343 says they are okay (especially if free). But for any serious deskphone users, ask Avaya about a deal on J169/179 phones which will be supported on IP Office in a week or two.



Stuck in a never ending cycle of file copying.

 

[Pepp77]

Go Scansource hosted and you can buy 9608 handsets for £4 each!!

| ACSS SME |

 

[Noibauten]

The J-129 is a very basic phone, it's good enough for a lobby or a kitchen. When you enter your phone number, you have to press call after. The screen is also very small.
I would not recommend it for desk users.

Noibauten

 

[sizbut]

When you enter your phone number, you have to press call after." - That's pretty standard for SIP phones and any phone that supports en-bloc dialing so don't pick on the 129 for that.

You can dial the number first and then lift the handset when you want it to actually dial that number. (No need to listen to dial tone

Stuck in a never ending cycle of file copying.

 

[VoIP Numpty]

Really? doesn't it have a timeout like most SIP phones?

 

[biv343]

I've got one on my desk - dial a number, wait a few seconds and it sends the call. No need to press Call unless you want to.

 

[Andhee]

If you were serious about the Avaya line of phones you'd know they just release additional models of the J100 series.
Avaya's got a pretty detailed spec sheet on the J129's and their capabilities.

https://www.avaya.com/en/product/j100-series-ip-phones/

Really loving the J169 and J179 once Rel.11 happens next month.

If vegetarians love animals so much, why are they eating all of their food?

 

[kyle555]

I'm curious to see what they disclose about this whole CCMS over SIP thing that enables IPO features on the J series phones. I'd always figured the next thing would be to build a lightweight PPM server into IPO to deliver features to 9600 SIP phones like they do on the enterprise side.

The interop note for how it does SBC remote worker will be very interesting and informative as to how this whole CCMS over SIP thing works.

Hopefully it's simple enough like making a text file of macaddress.txt with the specific feature mappings that the Jseries phone can use like PPM and isn't a wheel the IPOffice people are reinventing with bumps and hiccups in the road that render them useless for certain business cases until they work the kinks out.

 

[TheSmash]

I'm going to Avaya on Wednesday and Thursday for the J-Series Boot Camp. I'll try and get some info on how the CCMS over SIP works.

ACSS (SME)

 

[poopus]

Thanks to all for their comments on the J-129 phones. I already knew they were pretty basic but wanted to hear from actual users of the phone. I currently have a CS1000 so not familiar with the IP office line of phones. Not sure about andhee's comment, not a vendor I would chose.

 

[Michael Brown]

We deployed a little over 300 J129 phones in our school district and I would have to agree with the previous comments they are pretty basic phones. I will list a few odd things I have seen with them which may or may not impact you.

They seem to sometimes get logged out from our IPO system for unknown reasons or would not fail over properly. A reboot would not fix it as the phones are logged out and will need logged back in. We start to specify the username and passwords in the config file for the phones which helped a lot.

Phone settings like volume control are not saved across reboots. This is a pain in a classroom when we need it up all the way.

The wall mount documentation is wrong. The documents say the wall mount comes with an Ethernet cable but it does not. Avaya says it should not but has not updated the documentation when I last checked.

It is very easy to place a call on hold and "hide it" so you can't tell there is a call on hold. You can make outgoing calls still but incoming will ring busy. We usually find this out a few days later when there is a complaint that a phone is always busy.

Not sure if it is just me or not but we have a lot of cables from Monoprice that don't seem to remain linked when the wires are pulled from the back of the phone. This does not seem to happen with our J129 or other devices with the same cables but other cables in the J129 phone seems fine so I can't place a real blame one way or another but it seemed odd.

The SIP dial timeout thing is not 100% accurate as you can use something like the below in a config file and get instant dial
[pre]SET DIALPLAN "[0-9]XXXX|81XXXXXXXXXX|8XXXXXXXXXX|*9X|#X"[/pre]

Day to day however I will say they are decent phones and do their job. I feel with a few changes tweaks to the firmware Avaya can resolve all the issues I have seen but I feel it would really depend on where you will be using these phone on if they will work for you.

 

[intrigrant]

Thanks for sharing your experience with the phones.
We will deploy them more often and your comment is appriciated.