Reviews Written by Kenneth

Back to the drawing board

Pros: Full featured, excellent sound quality (wnen working)

Cons: Phone systems should be reliable and dependable

VTech 5871 base unit/phone and 5808 remote handsets

The capabilities of this phone system are apparently advanced beyond its design integrity. The system does everything we would like and more, except it is exceedingly trouble prone. Over the last 1 ½ yrs we have accumulated the base and four remote handsets, as well as many trouble calls and emails with VTech. The base unit is sensitive to noise on the power line, and Vtech cautions about this. They do not caution against static, but walking across a carpet and putting the base phone back in the cradle on a moderately dry day will reset the date and time on the base unit, and normally its operation. In addition, once or twice a month during a phone conversation, or when picking up a ringing phone, the outgoing side of the phone quits working and the receiving party thinks the phone is dead. The solution is to hang up, remove batteries, power, and phone line, reinstall them, call the party back, then reset the day on the base unit. To add to this poor performance, in the last month two of the handsets can no longer find the base unit when powered back up no matter how long they were powered down.

For a top of the line phone system this is the most unreliable cordless phone system we have ever owned or heard of. It has interrupted so many phone calls, and caused so much frustration, that we have made the expensive decision to discard/recycle the entire system. I would not want to see anyone else suffer with this system or we would have donated it.

While it has the basis to be a great phone system, it needs to go back into Engineering to ruggedize its firmware.

As a note, this is written by a BSEE with 40yrs of complex troubleshooting experience. ...