Polycom VVX 1500 Review Oxford
Video calling has an important place in many business environments, regardless of how you might feel about sharing your red-eyed, unshaven or otherwise less than pristine Monday morning face with the world.
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Polycom VVX 1500 Review
Video calling has an important place in many business environments, regardless of how you might feel about sharing your red-eyed, unshaven or otherwise less than pristine Monday morning face with the world.
Face-to-face contact can add layers of sincerity and meaning to otherwise dry or abstract conversations. The camera lets you demonstrate physical objects, read body language and, for some users, overcome hearing disabilities. Few of us are completely comfortable on video, but the camera is here to stay, whether you're a small home-grown enterprise with a Skype connection or a massive corporation scheduling regular international video conferences.
Polycom's VVX 1500 video IP phone is one of the most sophisticated we've ever seen and, at around £659 (ex VAT), it's certainly one of the most expensive. This puts it well outside the budget a company may have for standard IP phones, for which a typical spend is between £75 and £130. Its size and feature set are almost as imposing as its price, all of which make the VVX 1500 best suited to sitting on senior staff members' desks or even occupying small dedicated video conferencing rooms.
You get plenty of features for your money. The 7in video touchscreen and accompanying two megapixel camera are the most immediate and you also get support for Polycom's open API. As such, it's compatible with voice recording and quality monitoring apps built for Polycom SoundPoint and SoundStation IP phones and also means that your company could create custom applications, for example to enable the phones to display news updates and company bulletins. A pre-installed app lets you display a slideshow of images from a flash drive connected to the phone's USB port.
If you want your phone to look inconspicuous, this is a poor choice. It's massive, measuring 380x250x 210mm and commands a large space on the desk. The screen can be folded down, but the phone requires the screen to be raised if you want to actually do anything, - even to make a call. The phone has a 10/100/1000 Ethernet port, an Ethernet pass-through for your PC, an RJ-9 phone headset port and, concealed under a flap at the side, USB and 3.5mm line out ports. It can be powered either via PoE or a 48V power supply, available separately.
The touchscreen buttons enable you to place calls to either traditional phone numbers or directly to other SIP devices via an IP address or URL. Clearly laid-out menus provide full access to the phone's local and network configuration settings. If you prefer not to navigate via the touchscreen, all the main options are replicated, along with a numeric keypad and a direction pad, on the body of the phone. There are also the usual volume controls and buttons to transfer and conference active calls. Fortunately, there aren't an overwhelming number of keys and they're quite clearly labelled.
Unlike more basic IP phones, the VVX 1500 works as soon as you connect it to your network, albeit in a limited fashion. We connected a pair of unconfigured phones to our network. They connected to our DHCP server by default and were assigned addresses. As soon as a phone had booted, we could place calls by entering the IP address of a compatible phone. For serious use, though, you'll have to assign your phone both a static IP address and a number on your phone server via either the phone's built-in administrator menus or its web interface.
Obviously, the phone's video calling capabilities are a key selling point. The aforementioned two megapixel camera can display a live video feed in either full screen or windowed views. Video quality is good and the camera can be rotated 45 degrees vertically to cover a wide range of angles. We were impressed with accurate colour and absence of motion blur and pixellation – we encountered no lag across our local network.
The VVX 1500 supports standard video over IP protocols and codecs including H.263, H.263+ and H.264. Although it's theoretically possible to place calls to any compatible video phone if you have its IP address and the routers and firewalls in between are configured to allow this, in practice, these phones are best used over a single network, either local or wide-area.
You'll need plenty of bandwidth for video calling. Full screen 352 x 288 (CIF) resolution video requires up to 768kbit/s for data transfer in addition to standard network overhead. This won't be a problem even on a 10/100 local network, However, if you want to use these phones to make voice calls over a company WAN or individual VPN link to a remote location, you'll need a high speed synchronous net connection – bandwidth depends on the number of phones you'll be using simultaneously. We recommend allowing 1Mbit/s synchronous bandwidth per phone.
Caption: Configuring each of the VVX 1500's six lines simply requires you to assign a user ID number to call and a display name to identify it.
We tested the phones over our Asterisk IP telephony system. Configuration was simple using the phone's web interface, which was clean, uncluttered and easy to navigate. We entered the IP address and port number of our SIP server in the phone's SIP settings. After that, all we had to do was go to the phone's Line settings and enter the extension number and display name we wanted for each line. Changing the settings on each configuration page forces you to sit through an extended two-minute reboot, but there's so little to change that this is a minor irritation. Voice calls worked perfectly, with excellent audio quality through both the handset and the built-in speaker. This is hardly surprising given the ubiquity of Polycom's conference phones.
We were unable to get the VVX 1500 to make video calls via our SIP server. This is a widely reported issue. Currently, the VVX 1500 is not listed as a supported video phone under Asterisk, the world's most widely used SIP server, or any related FreePBX derivatives. See Polycom's Interoperability Partner Matrix for a list of the major platforms and hosted service providers that fully support it - there aren't too many at the moment.
You only need to give the phone a few parameters to get it talking to your SIP server, although most servers currently only support voice calling for the VVX 1500.
Fortunately, this in no way prevents administrators from implementing video calling for VVX 1500 users. The best approach is to add a XML contacts directory to your TFTP server, containing the name and IP address of the video phones on your network. The VVX 1500 can search for and load your contacts from the server at boot time, if your DHCP server supports this.
Face-to-face contact can add layers of sincerity and meaning to otherwise dry or abstract conversations. The camera lets you demonstrate physical objects, read body language and, for some users, overcome hearing disabilities. Few of us are completely comfortable on video, but the camera is here to stay, whether you're a small home-grown enterprise with a Skype connection or a massive corporation scheduling regular international video conferences.
Polycom's VVX 1500 video IP phone is one of the most sophisticated we've ever seen and, at around £659 (ex VAT), it's certainly one of the most expensive. This puts it well outside the budget a company may have for standard IP phones, for which a typical spend is between £75 and £130. Its size and feature set are almost as imposing as its price, all of which make the VVX 1500 best suited to sitting on senior staff members' desks or even occupying small dedicated video conferencing rooms.
You get plenty of features for your money. The 7in video touchscreen and accompanying two megapixel camera are the most immediate and you also get support for Polycom's open API. As such, it's compatible with voice recording and quality monitoring apps built for Polycom SoundPoint and SoundStation IP phones and also means that your company could create custom applications, for example to enable the phones to display news updates and company bulletins. A pre-installed app lets you display a slideshow of images from a flash drive connected to the phone's USB port.
If you want your phone to look inconspicuous, this is a poor choice. It's massive, measuring 380x250x 210mm and commands a large space on the desk. The screen can be folded down, but the phone requires the screen to be raised if you want to actually do anything, - even to make a call. The phone has a 10/100/1000 Ethernet port, an Ethernet pass-through for your PC, an RJ-9 phone headset port and, concealed under a flap at the side, USB and 3.5mm line out ports. It can be powered either via PoE or a 48V power supply, available separately.
The touchscreen buttons enable you to place calls to either traditional phone numbers or directly to other SIP devices via an IP address or URL. Clearly laid-out menus provide full access to the phone's local and network configuration settings. If you prefer not to navigate via the touchscreen, all the main options are replicated, along with a numeric keypad and a direction pad, on the body of the phone. There are also the usual volume controls and buttons to transfer and conference active calls. Fortunately, there aren't an overwhelming number of keys and they're quite clearly labelled.
Unlike more basic IP phones, the VVX 1500 works as soon as you connect it to your network, albeit in a limited fashion. We connected a pair of unconfigured phones to our network. They connected to our DHCP server by default and were assigned addresses. As soon as a phone had booted, we could place calls by entering the IP address of a compatible phone. For serious use, though, you'll have to assign your phone both a static IP address and a number on your phone server via either the phone's built-in administrator menus or its web interface.
Obviously, the phone's video calling capabilities are a key selling point. The aforementioned two megapixel camera can display a live video feed in either full screen or windowed views. Video quality is good and the camera can be rotated 45 degrees vertically to cover a wide range of angles. We were impressed with accurate colour and absence of motion blur and pixellation – we encountered no lag across our local network.
The VVX 1500 supports standard video over IP protocols and codecs including H.263, H.263+ and H.264. Although it's theoretically possible to place calls to any compatible video phone if you have its IP address and the routers and firewalls in between are configured to allow this, in practice, these phones are best used over a single network, either local or wide-area.
You'll need plenty of bandwidth for video calling. Full screen 352 x 288 (CIF) resolution video requires up to 768kbit/s for data transfer in addition to standard network overhead. This won't be a problem even on a 10/100 local network, However, if you want to use these phones to make voice calls over a company WAN or individual VPN link to a remote location, you'll need a high speed synchronous net connection – bandwidth depends on the number of phones you'll be using simultaneously. We recommend allowing 1Mbit/s synchronous bandwidth per phone.
Caption: Configuring each of the VVX 1500's six lines simply requires you to assign a user ID number to call and a display name to identify it.
We tested the phones over our Asterisk IP telephony system. Configuration was simple using the phone's web interface, which was clean, uncluttered and easy to navigate. We entered the IP address and port number of our SIP server in the phone's SIP settings. After that, all we had to do was go to the phone's Line settings and enter the extension number and display name we wanted for each line. Changing the settings on each configuration page forces you to sit through an extended two-minute reboot, but there's so little to change that this is a minor irritation. Voice calls worked perfectly, with excellent audio quality through both the handset and the built-in speaker. This is hardly surprising given the ubiquity of Polycom's conference phones.
We were unable to get the VVX 1500 to make video calls via our SIP server. This is a widely reported issue. Currently, the VVX 1500 is not listed as a supported video phone under Asterisk, the world's most widely used SIP server, or any related FreePBX derivatives. See Polycom's Interoperability Partner Matrix for a list of the major platforms and hosted service providers that fully support it - there aren't too many at the moment.
You only need to give the phone a few parameters to get it talking to your SIP server, although most servers currently only support voice calling for the VVX 1500.
Fortunately, this in no way prevents administrators from implementing video calling for VVX 1500 users. The best approach is to add a XML contacts directory to your TFTP server, containing the name and IP address of the video phones on your network. The VVX 1500 can search for and load your contacts from the server at boot time, if your DHCP server supports this.
Author: Kat Orphanides & Andrew Webb