There is good information on this site about setting up a Polycom phone to work with Asterisk, but it's rather spread out and unorganized, so I thought I'd take some time to get it all in one place. These instructions apply to the 501 models, but I believe they would adapt well to other Polycom models. I also don't go into pushing out configurations from XML files on a TFTP server, but it may be the way to go if you're doing more than one phone. In the instructions below, TFTP is only really used to push out the firmware updates.

About the Polycom 501

If you're reading this to see how good certain phones are with Asterisk, let me tell you that the Polycom 501 has excellent features, but is a pain to configure and very tempermental. I've used Soyo phones (they're the worst all around), ipDialog phones (they're only a little better) and Grandstream's GXP-2000. As of firmware 1.0.1.9, the Grandstreams are a decent phone, easy and quick to configure, but they have a horrible echo in the speakerphone for the remote party. A firmware fix for this was promised in October 2005, but I decided to not wait and get some Polycom 501 phones as well, as Polycom phones are legendary for being excellent speakerphones, and the 501 model was their lowest priced speakerphone model. At time of this writing, Grandstream GXP-2000's are around $105, and Polycom 501's are around $190.

The Polycom 501's do have more and easier-to-get-to functionality than the GXP-2000's, and have a more professional look and feel (and a great speakerphone), but the most notable downsides of the 501 are its awful, obtuse and slow configuration interfaces. The relevant options for Asterisk configuration are buried fairly deep on the console, and the big problem with the web interface is that it takes at least an extra minute to become available even AFTER the phone is up and running. And, of course, every time you make ANY change in ANY section of the web interface and click "Submit," it has to do a soft boot..... so you can understand how tedious this can become. It makes the XML/TFTP configuration option look pretty good, even for just a few phones.

Some other points which might be important to you are that the GXP-2000 boots up much faster than the 501 (50 seconds for the GXP-2000, three minutes for the 501) and the 501 is very sensitive to power failures during bootup. If there is a power loss during the "Updating initial configuration..." phase, the config file that is written to the local flash will become corrupt and the the phone will be locked in an eternal boot cycle. Fortunately, there seems to be an easy fix for it (see below). I experienced this problem while I was making this documentation. The GXP-2000's are much more resilient and much faster to boot.

Finally, I've also noticed that, for some strange reason, the GMT offset for your time zone will not behave properly sometimes. This is because the web configuration for the time server and GMT offset differs from what is loaded on the actual phone itself. When the web interface finally starts up 1-2 minutes after the phone is ready, it reloads that info instead.

Overall, I might recommend them over the GXP-2000's at this point for professional installations, but with some firmware updates from Grandstream, they may be more evenly matched in the future.

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Configuring Asterisk

Proceeding to the configuration: these instructions were made with Asterisk 1.0.9, Polycom BootROM 2.6.2 and SIP software version 1.5.2.

For starters, might as well get the extension configured in Asterisk. As usual, three files to change: extensions.conf,