Review on 📞 Enhanced Communication with Grandstream GS-HT802 2 Port Analog Telephone Adapter - VoIP Phone & Device in Sleek Black by Carey Kocik

This is a great little device that doesn't try to make life easier for users as it offers a wide range of options. It works great with my two heavily discounted VOIP providers, Anveo and Future-nine, giving me do-it-yourself landlines for less than $100 a year. Of course, if you want the reliability of a standard landline phone, you'll need to hook up that device, router, and modem to a UPS, but again, that's a modest upfront cost compared to the monthly cost of most full-service counterparts. landline phones. However, there are a few notable downsides. First, to update firmware from Grandstream website, you must use http url, not https. This seems a bit dated for 2017 and suggests the company doesn't care much about security. To be fair, the device offers full control over the update URL, so you can also download the firmware from a computer on your local network, even over https. Obviously the device is intended for corporate users (which I am not) who want to deploy configurations and updates from a centralized internal server. The second problem I had was my phone randomly starting to ring or just doing weird partial rings with seemingly no callers. A look at the packet tracking from my border router revealed that Grandstream was under a remote attack. Although Grandstream is behind NAT, I configured the device to use UPnP, which resulted in it opening a port to the outside world on my router. I don't think any of these attacks were really successful, but it was annoying that my phone rang at odd times. The simple solution was to configure Grandstream to use keepalive instead of UPnP for NAT penetration. In fact, I originally used UPnP because I thought that keepalive might not be reliable enough for incoming calls. However, keepalive works great and doesn't allow random external IPs to contact my grandstream. Since keepalives is the easiest option to set up, it's really just the result of my overthinking. But again, they don't inspire confidence in the security of the device, so consider using them only on a secure network.