Asterisk PBX support / vendor

[JD Austin]

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 17:46, Lisa Kachold <lisakachold at obnosis.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 3:22 PM, JD Austin <jd at twingeckos.com> wrote:
>
>> Rhino does make good hardware.
>> Another local vendor is Xorcom; while their parent company is based in
>> Israel XorcomUSA is based in Phoenix.
>> The only thing I like about Xorcom hardware over Rhino is that it scales a
>> little easier.  It is USB2 based so you don't have to worry about whether
>> the motherboard is compatible with PCI cards (3v/5v), you can fit a lot of
>> telephony hardware in a small amount of space (for example this install:
>> http://picasaweb.google.com/twingeckos/FortPolkJointReadinessTrainingCenter#),
>> and it generally comes out at a slightly lower price for the customer
>> (sometimes significantly less).
>> That said... I don't care for the XR1000 server that Xorcom sells as it is
>> too underpowered to expand (ok for demos) but the XR2000 and XR3000 servers
>> are fine; they will be coming out with a more powerful XR1000 soon
>> thankfully.
>>
>
> Yes, I agree!
>
> voip-info.org is a one stop reference for all things Asterisk, BTW.
>
>
>>
>> Sangoma also makes fine Asterisk telephony hardware.  I haven't tried any
>> of the Chinese Digium knockoffs and probably never will.  I don't
>> recommend mixing different vendor's Asterisk telephony hardware as it is
>> very un-likely that the combination has been tested by either vendor.
>> For 'roll your own' servers I recommend Server Micro hardware.
>>
>
> I agree, provided the cards are installed right (PCI conflicts); if you are
> using Digium or Rhino cards.  I have not used the Xorcom USB2 stuff.
>
>>
>> Since the phones are what users actually touch get good phones :)  For
>> phones I generally prefer Polycom or Aastra phones.  You can use Cisco
>> phones if you flash them with the SIP firmware (there is chan_skinny for
>> Asterisk but why complicate matters); you may have to set qualify=no to
>> avoid registration issues.
>>
>
> I don't see any benefit using Cisco phones over Polycom?  It's nice to have
> a well supported firmware also.
>

I agree!  I've had a clients demand Cisco phones because it was 'what they
knew they liked'.  It was a trial by fire the first time to figure out how
to make them work (registration and other issues at first) and I had to roll
my own directory code but that wasn't that hard.

Polycom makes great phones and so does Aastra.  The main reason I like
Aastra over Polycom isn't that their phones are better (they're on par with
Polycom phones) but that they're much more asterisk savvy and way more
approachable (I'm nobody and I have the direct line to the Western Regional
sales manager).  Aastra phones even have a default mode where the phone asks
you for it's extension number and password and it seeks out the PBX server
(pretty neat) and a nice XML interface to make them do neat tricks.
 Polycoms have an XML interface that you can drive from the server also.
 NetXUSA does a pretty good job of supporting Polycom on Asterisk here
though.
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