BW530

Marketed Phone

Actual Phone

Fanvil market the BW530 as “an executive IP phone designed for power users in office environments. It is especially designed for maximum productivity and efficiency in everyday business scenarios. The BW530 has an integrated speaker phone allowing Conference quality hands-free.Supporting up to 3 SIP accounts and 6 programmable keys, the BW530 delivers best in technology service.”

Unfortunately the promises do not appear to meet expectations. It is more suitable for home use than business. Most office environments have a single IP PBX office staff expect to make more than one simultaneous call by pressing the Line 2 and Line 3 buttons unfortunately the phone is not capable of this. Fanvil state they could fix this flaw and allow Line 1 and Line 2 (but not Line3) to work with one SIP account simultaneously for a fee. As a workaround you can achieve two simultaneous calls using the Conference button.

The phone also looks different (in particular the LCD) in the marketing photos than it does in real life. In real life the silver painted areas have a cheap finish. Depressing of buttons is not as good as on say a Grandstream or Linksys/Cisco SPA phone.

Notes

• Support documentation is horrible.
• Web Interface doesn’t work through a Squid proxy.
• Buttons in the Web UI & Documentation often do not match label names on the phone.
• IAX2 support but only for one account. Configuration options for IAX2 are limited (such as choosing preferred codecs).
• 3 SIP accounts supported.
• 3 Line buttons, however they can only be used to pickup a line on different SIP Accounts (no simultaneous calling using Line buttons).
• Conference button can be used as a workaround to make two simultaneous calls but this can be confusing.
• Firmware on the website often older than what is loaded on the phone.
• Newer Firmware can be obtained from fanvil support though sometimes they can be problematic to obtain it from (refusing to provide it to the end user).
• Phone by default only allows web configuration from the LAN port. POE is supported through the WAN port. LAN port runs a DHCP Server. Recommended to bridge WAN/LAN ports and disable DHCP server by using phone configuration menu options before connecting to an office network and continuing configuration in the Web UI.
• Model number on back of phone is stamped “IP Phone” instead of proper model number.
• Default SIP useragent is “VOIP Phone 1.0”. This can and should be changed in WebUI.
• Unable to upload new ring-tones (by uploading a *.wav or similar).