Panasonic Announces Interoperability Certification for SIP Phones

By Raju Shanbhag
TMCnet Contributor

SIP-based telephones offer all the features of PBX (News - Alert), but they also offer improved efficiency and quality. This is achieved with the help of a system that takes out primary and basic-rate interfaces. This enables users can keep in touch with both mobile and fixed callers from anywhere. They can also improve cost efficiency by bringing together audio and video into a single line.

Exploring the SIP based telephony market more, Panasonic (News - Alert) has completed interoperability testing with its latest UTG Series of SIP-based telephones, the KX-UTG200B and KX-UTG300B with Digium’s Asterisk open source communications software. After this interoperability testing, Panasonic products are now recognized as Digium (News - Alert) Asterisk Certified products.

Panasonic SIP phones had to go through numerous tests before they achieved interoperability. This included tests on basic functionality, advanced calling features, scalability and reliability. With this interoperability certification, users can take full advantage of Asterisk (News - Alert) features on their UTG SIP phones.

This interoperability certification is useful even for enterprise customers as they can now own an affordable SIP telephony solution at low cost. At the same time, they need to compromise on the advanced features one usually expects from a SIP phone.

“As a leading supplier of business telephones, Panasonic continues to innovate and provide high quality, fully interoperable and cost-effective communication solutions to our customers in a wide variety of markets,” said Kim Murtagh, Senior Product Manager for Panasonic Business Telephone Systems. “Partnering with Digium allows customers who utilize the Asterisk open source feature to take advantage of Panasonic SIP quality and reliability on the desktop.”

Panasonic introduced its KX-UTG200B and KX-UTG300B SIP phones in May this year. The phones offer various standard and new features such as call forwarding, intercom, voicemail to email, fax to email, dial by name directory and so on. 

Edited by Maurice Nagle