Digium's AsteriskNow provides solid IP PBX base

Three of the four products in this Clear Choice Test have a version of Asterisk at their core, but Asterisk founder Digium also assembles and supports several of its own packaged versions of Asterisk: Asterisk Business Edition, a Digium Asterisk appliance, and AsteriskNow, a free IP PBX that was due to be released at just about press time. Because it was the only version to hit our 250-concurrent-user criterion, we tested very late beta code of the latter.

The AsteriskNow file can be downloaded here and has an ISO image that includes rPath Linux 2.6, Asterisk 1.4 and the AsteriskNow GUI application. Installation is done with a basic GUI, and there are about 15 standard questions to fill out during the installation process. After about 30 minutes in the Miercom lab, we had the fully functioning Asterisk-based IP PBX running.

The Asterisk Configuration Panel is a Web interface that requires the Firefox browser from Mozilla. The GUI is visually basic compared with its competitors. But it's still fully functional, and the fact that it is freeware makes its bare bones more palatable.

The list of certified endpoints is short, consisting of only Polycom phones. We used an approved Polycom endpoint, and by entering the media access control address in the user's information field, the Polycom was discovered and automatically provisioned and registered in the system.

We also tested provisioning multiple Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) endpoints and one IAX phone. We were able to manually provision all endpoints in one step by simply adding the extension, name and password. All of the commonly free VoIP standard codecs (G-711, GSM) were tested and supported.

SIP and IAX trunking are supported and the connection parameters were easily configured. We were able to set up outbound dialing by calling rules, which are stored in the default dial plan. Inbound dialing also was easily defined and routed to a queue, voice mail or to a given extension. The conference bridge was straightforward to configure and was secured by PIN code access as well as other normal shared conference privileges for users.

The Asterisk Configuration Panel's System Configuration tab leads to a separate Web interface and logon called the rPath Appliance Agent. With this interface we were able to change parameters of the underlying Linux operating system. We were able to perform backups and schedule updates as well as common configuration changes that previously would need to have been performed in the Linux CLI format.

All of the other systems tested were built upon Asterisk, which is a testament to the underlying system. However, the other vendors have built more advanced features on top of Asterisk, which are not available with this product. Also, AsteriskNow does not include native failover support, and the management tools, while Web based, are not as easy to use as the others tested.

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