Echoes with T32G phones

[JeremyB]

Hate to bring our bad experience. Last year, we tried many things to shake out our speakerphone echo issues with a handful of T32G phones during initial reliability testing of Yealink phones with some of our beta customers. Unfortunately, we found the speakerphones on T32G phones on the latest firmware to not be reliable. Specifically, while using G.722 HD codecs the Yealink would give off echo to the remote party. It would not be every call, but if you are a regular speakerphone user you would run into the issue typically about once every 1-2 days. It happened under G.711u as well but not as bad/noticeable. Under G.722 once an in-progress call had an echo back issue it could not be resolved unless the person on the T32G picked the call off speakerphone to handset, the T32G was placed on mute, or the T32G called back (terminate/reinitiated the call). Further more, the person on the T32G wouldn't be aware they were creating echo for the remote party unless they were told of it. This became quite problematic on dial-in conference calls.
Eventually, we degraded the codec support to G711u, and we still had some (albeit less) complaints. Next we pulled T32G phones from our support list and redeployed a different phone hardware vendor to all customers (vendor that I would not name on this forum). These bad experiences were pure direct SIP/RTP conversations, both T32G<->T32G as well to other vendor SIP devices, as well off-network terminations. Remote party didn't matter for us. From our observations, it appeared the T32G speakerphone had a code bug whereas it dynamically (randomly) switched off the echo-back echo cancellation on the speakerphone for a call and couldn't switch it back on until terminating the call. We did not have enough data points to say if this affected any other Yealink phones. We tried the 2 most recent firmware revs (which made no difference). Some data we collected seemed to indicate phone positioning altered the amount of echo back, but it didn't resolve the fact that it was occurring in the first place.

Sorry as we did not find a good solution.