There is an interesting new VoIP PBX product that has caught my attention.  I even felt compelled enough to get off my lazy butt and write a little review about it.  What caught my attention was that it's from one of my favorite hardware manufacturers.  I make no secret of my love for Aastra SIP phones so when I heard about the AastraLink Pro 160 PBX I had to find out more.  It's not actually shipping till late May 2008 and I’m not enough of a big shot to get any special love from Aastra so I haven't held one in my hands much less taken it for a test drive. When I do get my hands on one I plan to revise this review so check back later.  For now I do have a bit more information than what is generally available out there so hopefully people will get some value out of this little review.  Of course as always, this review is sprinkled with my own biases and opinions. Since I am an Electrical Engineer that has lived and breathed hardware/software for over a decade I obviously know everything and am always right so you don't need to question any of that ;-).

Ok so first of all I don't feel like I am some how betraying the whole Asterisk movement by taking an interest in something that is a closed source proprietary cousin.  Asterisk/FreePBX is still is a VERY good choice for companies of all sizes that want big business features, flexibility, and reliability at small business prices.  Having said that, one thing that continues to bug me about it to this day is its lack of some very basic things that many businesses take for granted in phone systems which I will elaborate on in a minute. It’s not entirely Asterisks fault as some of the limitations are hardware related. Again, read on to find out more about that.



The initial v1.1 firmware that will be available on product release will be based on Asterisk v1.2. v1.2 firmware due Q3 2008 will be based on Asterisk v1.4. According to Aastra, the sweet spot for this product is businesses requiring around 20 extensions. It comes with 6fxo and 2 fxs ports and has a hard limit of 50 extensions and 10 SIP trunks in the firmware. Probably because that is as much as the Mindspeed ARM processor can comfortably handle. Echo cancellation is handled by the ARM processor as well. One thing it has that Asterisk systems do not is a hardware failover of FXO port 1 to FXS port 1 so if the unit dies for whatever reason, a relay connects the two. Many businesses in the target for this product use incoming hunt group FXO lines so the first call always comes into FXO port 1 and if the system was down it could, for example ring an analog phone of FXS port 1 and the business can continue operating until such time as the unit can be repaired/replaced. This is a fairly typical feature for phone systems in this target market but something that is sorely missed on Asterisk phone systems. You could just hardwire a wall jack onto the PSTN line going to FXO port 1 but this is a more elegant solution in my humble opinion which is why most other phone system manufacturers in this target market already do this.

Apart from the Asterisk software, everything else was apparently custom designed by Aastra engineers. Everything from the hardware to the WebGUI which judging by the screenshots I have seen, appears to be relatively well laid out and feature rich. It’s nothing like FreePBX or Asterisk web GUI as far as I can tell but I would assume they spent some time on those GUI’s for their inspiration.  Of course, this system was designed to be tightly integrated with their Aastra 5xi phones and the updated line of 9133i and 480i and 480i CT phones which will be called 9143i aka 33i, 9480i aka 35i, and 9480i CT aka 35iCT. Unfortunately, the older phones will NOT work on this system and neither will other SIP phones. Probably due to the XML requirements. These same XML requirements give the system XML auto provisioning out of the box. In theory an end user could simply plug in the phone and enter an extension and password. This can also be done on Standard Asterisk systems if you follow my XML Auto provisioning instructions. Aastra is clearly trying to distinguish their products by providing very capable XML support. When a complete coding idiot such as myself can throw together a system using their XML templates and make it look like I am some sort of script wizard they must be doing something right.

Now for the killer feature IMHO. In v1.2 firmware due Q3 2008 the system will have KSU Shared line appearance emulation. This is the feature where someone would say for example, “Joe, your wife is on line 1, your girlfriend is on line 2, and your lawyer is on line 3” sort of thing. This feature is an absolute must for most small businesses in my humble opinion and I don’t think I need to elaborate on all the reasons why. The Asterisk developers seem to feel differently because they have shown that they have no interest in developing this feature. However, the developers aren’t the ones buying these systems. To their credit, the Asterisk developers tried to add SLA support in Asterisk v1.4 but according to the buzz I have heard, it’s kind of kludgy and doesn’t work very well so not very practical. I personally couldn’t get it to work anywhere near the way I would expect it to work. According to Aastra, they have developed their own separate daemon for this feature because they know how important it is for the target market and are confident it will be just the sort of implementation most customers would be familiar with from traditional KSU type systems.

Pros
*Integrates Open Source flexibility (Asterisk) with Aastra expertise and support
*Auto discovery and self provisioning of extensions out of the box
*Networking multiple systems
*No hidden costs for feature enablement
*Visual and standard voicemail
*Auto routing of fax calls to FXS port
*Shared Line appearance (v1.2 firmware due Q3 2008)
*Wall and rack mounting hardware in addition to desktop feet
*Emergency call priority
*Tight integration with Aastra phones
*UPnP
*Attractive price
*No hard drives
*Leverages Aastra XML capabilities
*Works with most SIP trunk providers

Cons
*Proprietary, only works with newer model Aastra SIP phones and only interconnects with other AastraLink Pro units
*Firmware is locked down and cannot be customized, patched, tweaked etc.
*Hardware is proprietary and not expandable with hard limits to number of FXO ports (6), SIP trunks (10),  interconnects (10), extensions (50), voicemail time (up to 8.5h), voicemail/auto attendant connections (10)

UPDATE (May 05, 2009):  Well I finally got my hands on one of these but haven't tested one out yet.  The SLA firmware has been out for awhile and there have been several Aastra phone firmware updates since this product first came out.  Apparently SLA still has problems which is what I expected to happen.  Aastra tells me they are working hard on fixing it so stay tuned.