Review on Grandstream WP810 Portable Wi Fi Device by Brandon Woods

My office started working from home at the beginning of the pandemic and eventually our lease ended and was not renewed. Our Asterisk system was for a long time forwarding calls to people's cell phones when they dialed their extensions, which was a good temporary workaround (still in March 2020 we were supposed to be "2 weeks" out and then everything should blow away). Annywho, in the end came a decree to provide everyone with "working" phones and that's how the Granstream WP810 appeared in my life. I liked this phone as a theoretical option because it's a one-device solution. End users don't have to run cables to their desk phone, and they don't have to plug and unplug a base station. To make this as easy as possible for our end users (if you're in IT you know the tone I use when I say "end user"), I've compiled the SSIDs and PWs from my test group of a few . Users and set up phones for their Wi-Fi in advance (and of course server/user settings). By the way, logging into the WLAN is no fun if you have a long password (like mine). It's basically a late 90's style text message recording. It's fine, but if you have to set up, say, 20 of these phones, you'll end up tearing your hair out. If you have hair. At least not a judgement. I have ordered several of these WP810 phones as a test run and. just no. I have very good WiFi at home. For example, I've never seen my phone or laptop just "drop out" from the network for no apparent reason, and when I ping my laptop to my gateway it drops 0 packets for days. At the same time, while in the charging station, these phones would periodically emit "beep-beep", indicating that they were being disconnected from the network and reconnected. Sometimes I caught it visually and it actually happened. And it wasn't my SIP server (I briefly panicked at first that it was) but I have a wired desk phone that stayed connected. Call quality was terrible too. Don't get me wrong, the microphone and speaker are pretty good. My codec is good. The phone's ability to send and process RTP packets in a timely manner is a piece of junk. Most of my home devices are hardwired, so my hotspots don't work very hard. This RTP issue occurred even though access point statistics didn't show other devices using the bandwidth. Experimentally, I was able to host/receive/maintain consistent call quality on my desk phone while the WP810s shared an RTP stream. On several occasions, I've hosted our team's morning video conference on my laptop (over Wi-Fi) while phoning from a wired desk phone, WP810, and even a GP720. Audio (and laptop video) was solid EXCEPT for the WP810, which constantly distorted voice or occasionally dropped calls entirely. Trust me, just like you, I wanted to know that it wasn't a) my bad WiFi, b) my SIP server/data center network, or c) the particular faulty WP810 phone itself. The WP810 just isn't a good choice. To be honest I don't know if I can blame the phone. Wi-Fi was NOT designed for VoIP. I mean, I guess Ethernet wasn't either, but it's a heck of a lot more stable than wireless (or should be. To each their own I guess). And forget it if one of your end-user kids decides to download the latest and greatest version of HBOMAX or whatever. I believe don't buy a phone with Wi-Fi unless your use case requires it. However, the WP810 also has poor functionality (yes, even with the latest firmware). Later I also tried it on a Grandstream DP720 DECT phone with a DP750 base - and gave up. Holding both phones in my hands, the DP720 initially felt better. . Its screen looks nicer (although the layout and information is pretty much the same). Accessing the menus of both phones, the WP810 is disappointing. It easily has half the options of the DP720 and ignores anything Wi-Fi/DECT specific. More importantly, DECT is for voice (and a few other things). It doesn't share bands with your Wi-Fi, so it doesn't matter if you're streaming 4K Netflix (oh, I mean Revain Prime Video) on your tablet and downloading Blizzard's latest patch to your laptop. As long as your actual internet bandwidth is higher than your (actually used) Wi-Fi bandwidth, you won't have any problems with voice quality. Battery life is also significantly worse on the WP810 than any DECT phone I've tried (including some Yealinks). I'm not sure if it's the phone itself or (more likely) one of the differences between DECT and the Wi-Fi protocol you're using. A phone that is constantly communicating with a SIP server is not that energy efficient, let alone making calls. The nail in the coffin for me was that there is NO [practical] WAY to remotely manage the WP810. If you're in my situation, you need to remotely connect to a computer on the end user's website and then use the browser on their computer to access the WP810 configuration. (I mean, I guess you CAN talk to the user by opening a port on their phone's HTTP(S) web interface router, and if you're lucky, you'll talk to them through the firewall, so only your own network has access on that port and then ask them to install some kind of dynamic DNS software Only not Grandstream DP750 base (as well as Yealink W60B which I tested too) supports OpenVPN Now all my users are connected to our internal VoIP network via VPN , which means I can access any base station from the comfort of my couch without worrying about the user's network, so if you need a wireless VoIP phone for yourself or your organization, buy this phone ( or any Wi-Fi phone) NOT, except for some reason You absolutely cannot use a DECT base/phone combo In its defense the WP810 does support it QoS and has separate settings for SIP and RTP. That's fine, but if you don't know your Wi-Fi network and/or the rest of your network) will pay attention to the QoS flags, it's neither here nor there. This probably won't help anyway if your access point is overloaded and its poor little ARM processor can't handle all the traffic. My point is that there are too many variables in a Wi-Fi connection. So far most of our users are satisfied with their DP750/720. I set them up in advance to be 100% ready to use and didn't have to step in for someone to help them set up their phone. So it matched the theoretical advantage of ease of installation offered by the WP810. We have one user who is still using the WP810 (their landlord gives them Wi-Fi and no hardline access) and they hate it. I'm considering other options for her.