IP Hardphones
A hardphone is a physical digital phone that looks similar to conventional telephones. Physically the notable difference would be which type of cabling plugs into the phone. IP hardphones use an RJ45 network adapter and plug into the computer network, while original analog telephones used a smaller RJ11 telephone line adapter.
Some hardphones are proprietary and only work with the vendors VOIP setup. So when looking for a hardphone be sure to see if it works well with Asterisk. Polycom is one of the popular manufactures of IP hardphones and there are plenty of models that will work well with Asterisk. For example a good phone to get stared with is Polycom’s Soundpoint IP 550. They currently can be purchased used for about $20-$40 on eBay (Links to an external site.).
SoftPhones
Since computer and IP based phones both communicate on the same network, software has been created to run on computer systems that allow a computer to act as a phone. These applications are known as softphones (software-based phones). With the rise of tablet and smartphone devices, many software vendors have also created applications that can run on these mobile devices, allowing them to make calls over the network.
A few of the popular software vendors include Ring, Jitsi, and Linphone. There are many more software vendors who make softphones. However, the listed vendors provide software than runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux desktops, as well as mobile devices.
In this course we will be using Linphone as the softphone of chioce. It has a very easy-to-use interface and works well on Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, and Apple IOS devices. It is also free and does not require registering to use the software. If you plan on using a softphone on your computer desktop, be sure to have and audio input and output device, a headset works best.