Why invest in an expensive PBX phone system when everything you need can be found in phones that simply plug right into your existing telephone jacks?

Most business telephone systems require all the phones in an office to be connected, individually, to a central control box or key service unit (KSU). The disadvantage is that the KSU and unique wiring require professional installation and programming, raising the cost and complexity of the system.

But, “non-KSU” phone systems do not require a central cabinet. Instead, each phone contains the circuitry necessary for features such as conferencing, intercom, and transfer. Installation is as easy as plugging in the phones.

Overview: Simple to install and use, this affordable multi-line speakerphone features Caller ID/Call Waiting when you subscribe to these services from your local telephone service provider. It also offers a convenient speakerphone, headset jack, 32-number speed-dial, and 3-way conferencing.

As your business expands, you can add additional telephones from within this AT&T series which can be networked into a system of up to 16 phones. Additional features include all-station paging, intercom, hold, call transfers between stations, four lighted line indicators, 16 intercom one-touch keys, two data ports, Centrex compatibility, and power failure protection.

The setup: For this review, we purchased one new ATT 1070 speakerphone (as well as an ATT 1080, which was necessary for testing features only available when using 2 or more phones of this phone system series). We connected each phone’s first two lines together, in a star topology, to distribute both lines of a two-line SIP adapter by Sipura using G.711u audio compression to our Asterisk 1.4 voice server.

As you can see by the picture on the right (click to zoom), all of the external telephone lines in your home or office must be wired to all phones. It is actually very common for homes and small offices to already have this wiring plan, so these new phones simply plug in where the old phones were once connected! Optionally, Line 4 can be shared by all phones, or unique as a “private line” exclusive to one phone, or a group of phones that might need a dedicated telephone number for external callers to reach them directly.

First thoughts: Unlike recent AT&T 4-line phones that looked more like a cheap, plastic, consumer-grade, home telephone trying to survive the daily abuse of an office environment, the telephones in this new series of “non-KSU” intercom phones (ATT 1040, ATT 1070, and ATT 1080) look and feel like professional business phones. It’s two-tone silver brushed metal and hard black plastic design fondly references back to the popular AT&T Merlin® KSU phone system of several decades ago.

The included manuals are outstanding! You receive a Quick Setup Guide, a Users Guide, and an Installation Guide. But these aren’t some tiny little pamphlet! Each of these books are about 50-150 pages, every page written in plain English, covering every single feature in a very clear and concise way to make sure you get your money’s worth out of everything this phone has to offer. (I have never been more impressed by documentation!) I found no typographical errors or confusing descriptions. The manuals really add some confidence to AT&T and the future of this new phone series!

The good: The four-way directional button and center “Enter” button become your primary tool to quickly and easily select features without the need to remember codes or special key sequences. In fact, all too often, these “non-KSU” phones will have buttons with two or more functions — not this new AT&T series! The buttons on the phone are self-explanatory and only serve the one function for which they are labeled. All related feature options appear on the blue backlit LCD screen when you are in a particular mode that offers more options. For example, when you lift the handset and press the Intercom button, the top half of the screen prompts “Intercom No.?” while the bottom half of the screen presents you to optionally “Page” a single extension (instead of simply ringing it) or to “Page All” and broadcast your announcement on all the phones in your home or office simultaneously.

Another improvement, which is why I suspect these phones aren’t backwards compatible with earlier AT&T “non-KSU” phones other than the 1000-series: the Intercom audio is digital, crystal clear. No longer will your Intercom calls be subjected to interference from a nearby radio station transmitter or other nuisance! With two phones side-by-side, you can detect a slight millisecond or so delay as an Intercom page is encoded on your phone to be then decoded on the destination phone. The sound quality is truly impressive and worthwhile. If you are currently experiencing any issues with your Intercom on older non-KSU phones, you might want to give a pair of these a test run.

The bad: If you transfer a call from one phone to the next, the caller hears nothing. No music-on-hold, no tones — nothing but silence. If they had offered an option to play a soft double-beep tone to the caller every couple of seconds, that would have been a worthwhile improvement over dead-air. (However, the ATT 1080 does play a “Please hold” recorded announcement every few seconds when a caller is transferring to an extension by way of the built-in auto attendent included on that ATT 1080 phone. But even that phone leaves the caller with dead air if they are put on hold or transferred by a human instead.)

One big disappointment was with regards to the system recognizing when a caller on-hold had disconnected. I tried everything in my “toolkit” of test equipment, but it seems these phones just don’t recognize (or don’t care) when a caller that you’ve placed on-hold chooses to hang up before you return to the call. The system will continue to keep that line blinking on-hold until you retrieve it — often to the frustration of loud dialtone in your ear.

It also would have been nice if the Hold button had a red-colored key for quick access. I realize its a minor complaint, but when you take a lot of calls it helps to have that button easy to find. I would suggest the purchase of a red permanent marker so you could do it yourself — you’ll thank me later!

The ugly: When integrated with an ATT 1080 with the “SYS EXT” voice messaging feature enabled, trying to figure out how to listen to your messages on any phone except the ATT 1080 is a huge headache! For a phone system that is so “menu-driven” by that directional navigation and “enter” button arrangement near the LCD screen, it is irritating to have to dig out a reference card to use this ATT 1070 phone to listen to your messages in the mailbox reserved exclusively for your extension but actually recorded and stored on the ATT 1080 voicemail/answering system. It just seems to me this could have been better thought out!

My guess is that AT&T would probably “recommend” that you purchase an ATT 1080 phone for every person who needs a voicemail/answering system, instead of using one ATT 1080 to serve voicemail for multiple ATT 1070 phone users as their advertising suggests.

Conclusion: Overall, this is the best four-line telephone AT&T has ever made! If you’ve ever experienced issues with any of the earlier four-line models, such as the ATT984, ATT974, ATT964, ATT955, ATT945, or ATT944. The 1040, 1070, and 1080 have been redesigned from the ground-up and the attention to quality really shows!! All advertised features worked beautifully, each button pressed produced the expected result — press the Transfer button while on a call, the LCD prompts “Transfer line to ?”. By keeping one function per button, and also utilizing the navigation menu-driven options through the phone’s display, anyone can easily figure out how to do anything on these phones without ever needing to read any of the documentation.

The speakerphone sounds nice, although the volume of the speaker could’ve been louder (in my opinion). Each phone allows you to control the ringing tone, volume, and delay ringing options for each line individually. Believe it or not, that level of control of line ringing assignments are usually reserved for KSU systems only! Intercom calling worked flawlessly. All-Page was loud and very practical for a busy home with office, or larger retail store.

With a cost of between $100-$150 per phone, these are an outstanding value for any large home or growing business with 2 or more phone lines looking for the simplicity of replacing their old phones with something more serious, flexible, and functional.

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