HELLO & WELCOME

[WelshPaul]

Having browsed Amazon.co.uk yesterday and again today, it appears Obihai have removed their long-standing offer and increased their prices.

• OBi100 - £50
• OBi110 - £60
• Obi202 - £64
• OBiBT - £25

They no longer stock any other devices here in the UK. What are your thoughts? Would you pay the extra?

Looking back, I can understand why none of the UK VoIP providers took up offering any Obihai devices to their customers. The OBi3xx series should have had OBitalk, Google Voice and the Obitalk portal disabled within the firmware. VoIP providers don't want their customers calling using or calling over another network even if it's free! Change logs and firmware downgrades are a must for VoIP providers!!

I wonder what the future holds for Obihai, they seem to be clinging on to Google Voice yet slowly disappearing here in the UK.

[paul1609]

Wont a lot of this be linked to the reduction in the value of the £ since the Brexit referendum?
As far as I can see there has never been a concerted effort to market Obihai products to the Uk general public, where is the pre-installed UK configuration that works straight out of the box?

[WelshPaul]

Wont a lot of this be linked to the reduction in the value of the £ since the Brexit referendum?

Maybe, I guess if you look at it from another point of view then some might not even consider it a price increase? They did offer a 25% discount for the best part of two years. Then again, the Obi202 is currently being sold on Amazon.com for $55.32, at today’s exchange rate that works out to be £45.10. I don’t believe it cost Obihai the best part of £20 per device to export and sell those in the UK? Brexit hasn’t even happened yet and probably never will!

As far as I can see there has never been a concerted effort to market Obihai products to the Uk general public

There was, pretty sure that is what Mark was employed to do back in 2014. Obihai managed to get Google back on board and therefore lost interest in anything else.

where is the pre-installed UK configuration that works straight out of the box?

I can understand why this never materialized looking back. If you think about it, it’s not cost effective. You’re looking at altering the same firmware file twenty or thirty times every time a new firmware revision is released. Then you must upload them to a download server etc…

What happens if someone downloads the wrong firmware file? One not customised for their region? Do Obihai prevent a device from accepting a firmware file that was made for a different region to prevent this?

There is a better solution (I think), have one firmware file for all devices but offer a drop-down option where a user can select their country and upon clicking submit, have the unit reboot and apply the regional settings for that county. Yealink have a feature like this on their phones:

No more custom firmware needed, no more custom XML files, less returns because the end user couldn't get it to work.