Now Shipping PAP2T Devices Temporarily

[VOIPoTim]

Due to the Chinese New Year, there is currently a Grandstream shortage.

At this point, no distributor in the country has HT502s that we know of including all the wholesalers and even the retailers like VoIPSupply are out.

Apparently nearly everything in China closes down for 2 weeks or so and exports are running weeks behind in customs.

Right now no new GS units are expected to arrive until mid February.

We had expected to have enough inventory to get through that, but we've seen order volume constantly around 7-10X our launch order volume every single day since last weekend. The bulk of these customers are coming from Voicewing. We have completely depleted our supply of HT502s.

We've been in the process of purchasing 3300 from a company going out of business and went ahead and completed that transaction only to have them get held by Canadian customs because the seller did not properly do the paperwork. They were supposed to arrive Friday, but did not.

With that being said, we don't have a lot of other options for HT502s at this point. We've ordered a shipment of Linksys PAP2T-NAs this week and will be shipping those until the Grandstream supply chain catches up.

Generally we ship next day. Some orders from mid-last week have not shipped yet, but the PAP2Ts will be here Monday and all pending orders will ship.

We don't expect any issues with the devices and they are fully provisioned in the same way. As a matter of fact, a lot of users seem to prefer the PAP2Ts anyway.

If anyone has any questions about this, please let us know.

[KenH]

Tim,

Is there a trade-in program for the 502's? (grin)

Ken

[NY Tel Guy]

Tim,

Is there a trade-in program for the 502's? (grin)

Ken

The sound quality on the 502 is better in my opinion.

[dcshobby]

Tim,

I have a question. I thought when you chose the grandstream units, you guys chose them because they worked better than the Linksys PAP2 units. Are these going to be an issue for new customers as I thought you wanted all hardware to be the same to prevent support issues that may arise with just some new customers have the Linksys and everyone else having the Grandstreams.

Just wondering why you decided to throw another hardware vendor into the mix. Just twice as much work for you and the engineers and support staff one would think.

[VOIPoTim]

Tim,

I have a question. I thought when you chose the grandstream units, you guys chose them because they worked better than the Linksys PAP2 units. Are these going to be an issue for new customers as I thought you wanted all hardware to be the same to prevent support issues that may arise with just some new customers have the Linksys and everyone else having the Grandstreams.

Just wondering why you decided to throw another hardware vendor into the mix. Just twice as much work for you and the engineers and support staff one would think.

Well we wanted to keep everything the same, yes. Ultimately we just don't have a choice though. Right now we won't be able to get any Grandstream units for over 2 weeks. So our only option was to get something else or cancel the thousands of orders we'll get between now and then because people won't wait 2 weeks for shipping.

The biggest advantage of the 502 over the Linksys unit is the fact that it has a built-in router. So that's a little kink in the mix, but we'll provide an alternative in situations where the customer does not currently have a router.

We also have some other reasons for wanting to integrate the PAP2 into everything in that certain other providers with financial challenges use it, so in the event that something were to happen, we'll be prepared to service users with the PAP2 as well as the 502 if users want to keep their existing devices and have them added to our provisioning. We've been planning on that for a while and had no intention of shipping them out normally, but in this case we need to.

Another thing we've noticed is that for certain network setups, different ATAs work better. As an example, we had many users who had perfect service with the 286 and then when they swapped for a 502 (most wanted the cloned line), they started having issues. Don't get me wrong, the 502 works extremely well, but in some cases (like with 2Wire modems), I think the devices without a built in router work a little better. This will give us some options support wise and may even structure ordering to have users identify their network setup/preferences to get the best fit ATA wise (PAPT2 for some setups, HT502 for most).

[Montano]

Tim, can those of us with PAP2T's get them provisioned through Voipo ?

[VOIPoTim]

Tim, can those of us with PAP2T's get them provisioned through Voipo ?

Yeah you'll be able to next week. The provisioning system will support both devices.

[Brian]

What about the issues we've seen with calls dropping at 30 minutes? Is that something that's been addressed?

[VOIPoTim]

What about the issues we've seen with calls dropping at 30 minutes? Is that something that's been addressed?

With the session timers? If so, that's taken care of, yeah.

[Montano]

Will they remain unlocked if we provision them with Voipo ?