Grandstream Powerful 2-Port ATA with Gigabit NAT Router

Although landlines are largely replaced with cell phones, you may have a reason to hold onto an old number. This was the case for us having owned a line for many years, but the rising costs had become unreasonable ($45/mo), just to keep a line that rarely gets used.I began looking at alternatives, and two stood out: give up the line entirely, or port the number to a VoIP provider. Some of you might say to port the number to a cell plan, but even $15 per month on a prepaid plan would feel wasteful.So, before ditching the line, I looked into VoIP, which honestly is a bit confusing. Some providers sell hardware/devices and bundle the service with that, others use stand-alone devices. I looked into the bundled service + device route first but those seem to have really bad customer service or quality of service reviews. Their pricing can also be quite deceptive on what you would actually pay.After that I saw a few recommendations for a VoIP provider based out of Canada as having great pricing and works with a variety of stand-alone devices like this Grandstream. I went this route and am very pleased with the result.For starters, my family can’t even tell anything changed. After a few days my landline number ported successfully to the new provider. Incoming and outgoing calls work just like they did before, and the sound quality seems the same.The Grandstream device itself works great. I am not using this as a router, I just plug it into an open LAN port on my network, and then run a line to my existing cordless home phone. It is small, doesn’t get very warm, and isn’t obnoxious with its indicator lights. Programming the device to connect with the VoIP provider did require following a guide, and the UI isn’t the best looking but gets the job done. The good thing is once you get it connected and working, you’ll probably never need to touch it again.Opportunities for improvement - Updating to the latest firmware is confusing – why is the wrong update URL set at the factory? I was able to update after finding instructions online. Also, the WebUI feels like a throwback to setting up an old router from the 90s.

My company uses the new NUSO Green system, and this was the latest version, V2. They had this connected to the system in under 2 minutes, including getting Caller ID with both number and name display working. Very reasonable price for the performance. Also, the username/password to get in is admin with the password on the physical device.

Followed instructions on voip.ms website for a similar model and it was not too hard to setup except some things were on another page. Seems to work good. You do not need to login to the router you can just dial *** (3 asterisks) into the phone then wait for it to say "wait for menu option" after that dial 02 and it will say its ip address.

This device has pretty darn good hardware at a very reasonable price. Not only that, but it works really great once you get it configured. Another nice thing - this device is completely self contained and you have full control of it's workings by using a web admin on the device. However, it's not plug and play easy to set up. Although, if you have a little bit of IT experience, and have played around with admin screens of routers before, and if you read what I had had to go through to get this working, you'll be able to get it working reasonably quickly.1) Getting Access to the Web admin interface of the BT812It's a good thing that this device is completely self contained. If you plug it in to your home network, it will grab a DHCP ip address and boot itself up. The only trick to this process is you'll have to log into your wifi router (or whatever other device that handles your DHCP server) and look up all the DHCP leases. Unfortunately this device does not set the Hostname, so you have to look at the MAC address on the bottom of the device to hunt for which DHCP lease matches your IP address. Once you've found the IP Address you can log into the device using http:// <IP Address> The default login is admin/admin2) Firmware UpdateThe firmware on the device I got from Amazon is the pretty old version 1.0.31.X I saw the most recent version being 1.0.41.2 so I set out to upgrade firmware before doing anything else.WHAT DOESN'T WORK TO UPGRADE THE FIRMWAREAfter digging through the what seems like 200 options on the (maybe it's only 120?) on the "Advanced Settings" page, It looked to me like the the device was configured to update the firmware when it's rebooted. So I rebooted. It didn't work. Looking further there was an option to "Upload from local directory". I downloaded the firmware from the grandstream website, unzipped it, and trying to upload it using this button. I tried a few times and it didn't work. Once it spun away for a long time and ultimately nothing happened. Another couple times I tried it and got an error that the file was too big. At this point I tried reading the documentation. (So far about 45 minutes in trying to get this to work)WHAT WORKS TO UPGRADE THE FIRMWARETurns out all that all that was necessary to get the upgrade to work was to change "Firmware Server Path" to "firmware.grandstream.com" Then "Update" then "Apply" then "Reboot". After it reboots you will see the device start to flash all the lights for a couple minutes and then after it reboots again you will be upgrade to 1.0.41.2. Woo hooooo! Took me about an hour to get this far, but once you know what I just told you, shouldn't take more than 10 minutes or so.CONFIGURING SIPMy SIP provider is Flowroute, so I list the details below for Flowroute. However, other SIP providers are probably quite similar, so following something close to the steps I outline below should work for you.This is not difficult once you realize you can ignore the darn near all of the 200-odd settings.SetUnder Profile 1, "Primary SIP Server " to the Flowroute server nearest to you, which for me is "us-west-or.sip.flowroute.com "Update and ApplyGo to the Flowroute website, log in and go to /Interconnection/Registration to get your SIP credentials: which are the Flowroute Username/Auth Username (an 8 digit number for me). And also copy the the Flowroute Password.On the Grandstream GUI, go to the "FXS Menu" and edit "Port 1":Set both the "SIP User ID" and "Authenticate Id" to your Flowroute UserName/Auth Username.Set the "Password" to your Flowroute Password.Update, Apply, and RebootAt this point it works great!!

Really great product for VoIP. Used multiple phones from old TrimLine to Panasonic wireless phones.Once you get the dozen or so options (out of a couple hundred) correctly set your good to go. You do need a solid internet connection and when power goes out the phone also goes out unless you have both your internet devices and the GrandStream on a power backup. I have a HT812 on Quantum Fiber.

To be more precise, Ooma tech support claims that they cannot provision the device to work with their system and that you should instead buy an Ooma compatible version... which probably means buying directly from them for a significantly higher price, unless you can get one one sale or aftermarket.