Saturday, April 5, 2008

Aastra and Linksys support added

At CEBIT I met up with Product managers of Aastra and Linksys phones. With their support we have been able improve our support for both phone brands of phones. Build 4393 of 3CX Phone System now includes provisioning support for Aastra phones as well as BLF support.

Linksys provisioning support will be added by next week, whilst Linksys has announced BLF support in its new firmwares out in about 1-2 months. (BLF support is already available on Linksys 962 phones, but we need to make changes to support Linksys BLF) We are busy working on supporting Linksys BLF in version 6 of 3CX Phone System - due out some time in May.

The good thing is that companies now have more choice of phones they can use with 3CX: Aastra, Linksys, Grandstream, Polycom and of course SNOM.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, Hardware is in fact much better than software. Much better latency for example. Thats why it does not make sense to use a software PBX. In fact a hardware SIP PBX does not cost more anymore than a software PBX.

Nick Galea said...

Your new to VOIP then? :-)

Latency has nothing to do with the pBX. It has to do with the VOIP Gateway and the IP phones. What you term a hardware based PBX is in fact a computer pre-installed with a software based PBX. SO latency does not come into it at all.

Anonymous said...

You are very, very wrong with the latency and very right with the hardware based PBXes.

But there are two types of "hardware" PBXes. The first type you mention is the the one for the home and hobby markt. They are usually just using a windows or linux to asterisk etc. The quality of such PBXes is the same as "software" PBXes since they are the same.

Professional PBXes use since the late 60s realtime kernels. As you might know that was one reason for the development of Unix.

Professional companies such as Siemens, Samsung etc have large development teams to maintain those realtime operating systems for the PBXes and for the phones, gateways etc to keep the latency to a minimum.

Luckily such professional boxes are becoming more and more affordable thus making VOIP to a real success!

Nick Galea said...

On a 3CX PBX using professional IP phone and gateway hardware there is no latency at all. Try it before you assume.

There is a big difference between 3CX and the cheap hardware PBXs you are talking about.

3CX runs as software on Windows, and is in charge of switching calls. As soon as a call is switched to its destination, the call is continued directly between the gateway and the IP phone, thus offloading all load of the call away from the computer. The phones and gateways have dedicated processing power and digitization hardware to be able to handle these calls capably.

By contrast an appliance has a gateway card in the computer itself which takes a lot of processing power when receiving a call. When the call is switched, the call continues to be on the appliance since it can not be offloaded to a gateway.

Windows is a very powerful operating system, and with modern hardware can capably switch calls for hundreds of simultaneous calls. (equating to thousands of users) Ours has been tested with 128 simultaneous calls and could easily handle more. And there is no latency what so ever.

The custom real time OS of the PBX manufacturers are expensive to maintain and don't support latest hardware like Windows does. (64bit and so on) Nor can features be easily added. Thus they are simply becoming part of telecommunications history.

Unknown said...

Btw, just to remind. It seems Linksys still not have BLF. At least I din't find any settings for BLF in configuration of SPA 962.

Anonymous said...

I am interested in your comment:

(BLF support is already available on Linksys 962 phones, but we need to make changes to support Linksys BLF)

I have not yet seen any support in the SPA962 for BLF, without the use of the SPA932 sidecar, which does support standard BLF. However I wasnt aware that Linksys were intending to support BLF natively, that would be a great improvement on their phones.