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The Bottom Line

The Grandstream BudgeTone-102 (BT-102) has been awarded Best of Internet Telephony at the Internet Telephony Expo in Miami. It was credited for its high quality audio, very low cost and open standards. It is an ideal phone for both small office and home use.

Manufacturer's Site

Pros

• Good value for the relatively low price
• Simple to set up
• Simple to use
• Large buttons for comfortable pressing

• Clear and visibly pleasant display with backlight

Cons

• Quite limited set of features
• Only one entry for call lists
• Only one account possible

Description

• Two RJ-45 ports for Ethernet connection
• Support the following protocols: IDHCP, CMP, SARP/RARP, DNS, NTP, TFTP
  
• Uses Advanced Digital Signal Processing (DSP) as signaling protocol, achieving great hi-fi voice quality
• Supports the following voice codecs: G.723.1, G.729A/B, G.711, G.726, G.728, and wide-band G.722 (Model 102D); among others
  
• Supports most of the standard IP phone features like: CallerID, Call Waiting, configurable emergency dialing (e.g., 911) etc.
  
• Supports three-way conferencing
• Supports the following algorithms for enhancing voice quality: Silence Suppression, VAD, CNG, Line Echo Cancellation, and AGC
• Supports QoS - Layer 2 (802.1Q VLAN, 802.1p); Layer 3 QoS (ToS, DiffServ, MPLS)
  
• Configuration can be made manually for one phone (using keypad and the web interface) or automated for mass deployment.
• Works with other third party SIP devices, gateways and related products, and proxy servers

Guide Review - Grandstream Budgetone 102 IP Phone Review

The first thing noticeable with this nice phone is its price. It is quite low compared to other phones in this range. The low price comes more into evidence once you experience the great audio quality when you start using it.

The phone is quite easy to set up and use. Since it allows for only one single account, configuring it using the internal web server is a breeze. The opening page offers authentication for either the administrator or user, the default factory passwords being respectively 'admin' and 'user'. To configure, log on as administrator, go to Advanced settings and set the SIP server, outbound proxy, SIP user ID and authentication IP. You can obtain these information from your service provider.

There is a red LED that lights up to notify about events, like errors in connection, voicemail waiting, etc. There are many other settings you can make, like time and date, regional settings, PC handshaking etc., but which are not crucial for the functioning of the phone.

Note that this phone is not accompanied by printed user manual; but you can download the whole documentation from the Grandstream website.

Many people tend to get confused between Grandstream Budgetone 101 and 102. These are two flavors of the same phone, the only difference being that the 101 has only one RJ-45 port while the 102 has two. This increases the connectivity of the latter.

View my list of top IP Phones

Manufacturer's Site