Z-Connect VoIP Phone – Yuck
GEARHEAD INSIDE THE NETWORK MACHINE
Mark Gibbs
With VoIP becoming all the rage and appearing in consumer devices, there’s lots of interesting products for us to look at. A consumer-level VoIP telephone that we’ve had in the queue for a few weeks is the Z-Connect G668 (www.networkworld.com, DocFinder: 8837) from Soyo Group.
Our first impression was that this is rather ugly. The body is conventionally shaped and smooth black plastic, but it and the handset are trimmed with a brown, leather-textured material. Yuck. And the handset also has a pointless silver highlight strip. These details give the telephone a cheesy, 70s look.
Leaving aesthetics aside, the G668 is easy to set up if you have a DHCP-enabled network – you just connect it to the network (then plug your PC into the phone – the phone provides a pass-through service), power it up, and it works. During our tests the call quality was good to very good.
On-network calls between Z-Connect phones are free and the phone comes bundled with 150 minutes of calls to phones off the Soyo network, incoming calls, which also count towards your service minutes usage, require the Plus service, which costs $9.99 per month. The toll for off-network calls depends on the destination, but charges for calls to the U.S., U.K., France and Canada are 3 cents per minute while Germany is 4 cents.
When it starts up it is kind of cool to see your phone displaying the message “Booting …”but here we hit the first of the functional issues with the G668: In our environment the phone then displayed “Wait Logon …”followed by “Failed.”Then, after it had thought about life, the universe and everything for a few seconds, the phone reported “Ready for calls”.
While setup on a DHCP-enabled network is easy the same isn’t true for networks with static addressing, or if you want to connect directly to a broadband modem supporting PPPoE. For these environments you’ll have to configure the G668 from the device’s keyboard, which requires reading the manual – here’s where the product completely falls apart.
A little more money could have been spent on translation from whatever language the manual was originally written in. For example, the key “Volume+” is described in the manual as “Turn over manual backward.”We pressed the key repeatedly but the manual didn’t turn over.
A crucial problem is that the phone currently ships with 1.42 firmware while the manual is for Version 1.22 firmware (which you can only determine by looking at the minute text on the screenshots in the manual).
What is odd is why the company would change some of the basic operations of the phone between versions, such as how to get into configuration mode. If you try to follow the instructions for setting up a static address using the supplied manual you will get absolutely nowhere. This is inexcusable because it puts an unacceptable load on the consumer to figure out what is going wrong.
If you look for the latest manual on the Soyo Web site, you’ll find that the online version is for firmware 1.41, but at least the instructions work.
The G668 has a built-in Web server so that once an IP address is assigned you can modify the phone’s configuration using your Web browser – this is good because it allows for centralized management.
The screenshots in the manual that ships with the phone show the latest firmware has reduced the configuration options so using the G668 with another service provider isn’t possible unless you call Soyo (good luck, we could only get voice mail at 9:30 a.m.) and get the “secret superadmin” password.
The G668 also provides a few other bits of bad product engineering. For example, product updates were originally designed to be delivered directly by FTP to the G668 but even though support for this feature has been dropped by Soyo, the fields for specifying the update server are still on the Web configuration page.
At $90 this is one of the cheapest complete VoIP phones available. If it wasn’t for the lousy documentation and messed up features we’d like this device.As it is, it is flawed and ugly.
Close call? Tell gearhead@gibbs.com. As always, check Gearblog (www.networkworld.com/weblogs/gearblog).
Copyright Network World Inc. Sep 12, 2005