Hi:
We have been looking at AudioCodes products for a pri solution to use with MTE. I am wondering what everyone else out there is using and having success with? I would love to hear some thoughts and suggestions as to the best equipment out there for use with this software.
Thanks,
Larry
Submitted by olekaas on Sat, 03/28/2009
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Submitted by eeman on Sat, 03/28/2009
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Ive been using TE412P cards
Ive been using TE412P cards in vanilla asterisk 1.4.x for years without issue. Always spend extra for echo canceling, its worth every penny. The vanilla asterisk servers comprise a mesh network of call routing, and they service a SIP trunk to the MTE as well as service SIP/IAX2 trunks to other customers. Never an issue.
We use AudioCodes Mediant 2000. Over the past 4-5 year I only had to reboot one of them due to degraded sound quality (AFAIR the reboot only takes 30 seconds or so). Another went down due to a defunct PSU. Our supplier only had chassis with redundant PSU in stock and I opted in for one (really - if I knew they could be delivered with redundant PSU I would have selected that from the start). The PSU's are not monitored, however. So you only know you have a bad PSU if power to the remaining good one is cut off. Even though the PSUs are not monitored and not hot swapable, it still makes sense to have it.
I believe that using an appliance with well tested firmware over eg. an asterisk with pri cards have saved me quite a deal of headaches over the years. The sound quality is good and I would say from my experience that both hw and sw is close to rock solid. I would have suspected the manual to be a bit more elaborate. Say you have found feature XYZ on/off in the webinterface and you turn to the manual to figure out what will be the best setting for you, it will often tell you something like 'here you can turn feature XYZ on or off'. Then again the manual isn't - and shouldn't be - a guide to how pstn telephony works.
The webinterface is a bit... well... too much JS. It's just a way to configure a piece af hw - not a fancy website. I prefer fast and ugly over fancy and annoying. Sadly it is both ugly and annoying. Luckily, you don't have to fiddle much with the webinterface once you have reached a proper configuration. Btw not all options are available through the webinterface - some needs to be edited in the backup file and reloaded to work. You can also buy a management suite (big bucks) that can manage multiple gateways in multiple locations. I have never seen it, but I suspect that there has been a greater effort here in making a good interface.
You don't need to update firmware very often and thats good because its hard to obtain. You have to obtain it through your supplier and you also have to obtain a license key before upgrading. The last license key I installed allowed upgrade to revisions below 9.99 - so that is probably not an issue any longer.
To put it short: We are very satisfied with our AudioCodes gateways.
We use OpenSER to route between PBXs and gateways and it works very well.