Atcom IP04

Back in 2008 I posted an article about Affordable IP Phone Systems. This was all very well but I hadn’t actually ever touched the Atcom IP04 / IP08 phone system.

A couple of months ago I was able to get my hands on a demo unit thanks very much to Hadley at Nicegear. I regret being very busy with Uni at the time meant I wasn’t able to conduct an in-depth or scientific review.

Here are some of the things I can remember about the unit and the process of getting it up and running. Please note I would recommend trying it out first if you are considering going this route before leaping into it.

Hardware specifications

• CPU: 400MHz Blackfin 532 DSP Chip
• Zero/Four/Eight analog (FXO/FXS) module interfaces (IP01/IP04/IP08)
• 256MB NAND flash storage
• 64MB SDRAM

Software Features

• Built-in configurable Asterisk IP PBX
• Web based GUI
• High performance OSLEC (Open Source Line Echo Canceller)
• Voicemail
• Call forward, call waiting, call transfer
• Call conference
• Call queues
• SIP trunking, IAX trunking
• PSTN analog trunk (up to four PSTN trunks)
• Flexible dial plan
• Configurable IVR menu
• Replaceable MMC/SD memory

Setup

I constructed my review with a specific small business in mind (30 extensions, 7 trunks). Four trunks would be analogue and the rest VoIP. Extensions were going to be SIP but terminating to Linksys SPA8000’s as analogue adaptors as we have an existing analogue infrastructure in place (lots of cordless phones which were going to be challenging to find affordable VoIP alternatives).

First I launched straight in and tried to get it working. I couldn’t seem to get a dialtone on any of the analogue extensions. After a bit of playing around I decided to revert the settings to factory default. This got the analogue ports going properly in no time.

I set up a few extensions, that was OK, but I ran into some difficulty getting auto attendant / pre-recorded messages to work properly. Turned out that the extension group that was being used by the messages seemed to be conflicting with something, perhaps with the extension range I chose for the normal extensions. I opened up the extension list and there was some weird thing going on with the recorded message extensions being listed twice in the extension list – sorry I can’t remember exactly, but I did get it working without too much hassle.

Setup did take a bit of trial and error, however performing maintenance with the GUI should be a breeze after the initial setup.

Call Quality

The only oddity I noticed here was once when I was on a call and navigating the configuration GUI at the same time, I heard some digital artifacts on the line as each page was loading. I restarted the unit and didn’t have it happen again after that.

Based on a couple of unscientific test calls (Analog Phone > Atcom Unit > Analog Line > Telecom > Analog PBX) I came to the conclusion that the calls were a little noisier over the Atcom box than my normal line. I didn’t have any other ATA’s to compare what the quality was like. I imagine any FXO / FXS will degrade the quality slightly (any conversion from analog to digital), so wasn’t particularly worried about this. It could have also been to do with gain settings etc. If you were in a total VoIP environment, or using other adaptors to do the analogue conversion, this would not be relevant, as the quality of VoIP only calls was not at all degraded by the Atcom.

Conclusion

When looking at direct costs, this box would be hard to beat. We decided not to go with it at this stage, primarily because we were able to purchase our existing PBX for a good price.

The Atcom isn’t for the faint of heart – you do have to be prepared to do some tinkering to get this working right. However it should be easy to maintain after the initial setup. Admittedly I didn’t have to use the command line at all. I love the idea of no moving parts – and you shouldn’t settle for anything less (I could accept a fan or two). Consuming less than 5 watts of power is excellent.

I would recommend this unit to users who are going to use VoIP throughout their system (or at least for the trunks) rather than using analogue adaptors – although you should have a couple of analogue lines for failover and emergency calling. Do some experimenting of your own if you are planning to use analogue phones with it.

It would be great to hear about your experiences with these or other VoIP units, as would any other readers. Please leave a comment below or send me an email. Thanks!

There is a strange sense of security that goes with having a dedicated appliance for something as critical as telephony. Businesses that are used to having a phone system on the wall somewhere may not be totally comfortable having a phone system running on any old PC sitting in the server room (although this could be a safer option, as you always can drop the hard drive into another machine if something goes wrong with one).

While there have been Asterisk appliances from major names like Digium, their cost is not much cheaper than a POTS system, making migrating from a traditional phone system hard to justify. The Atcom IPxx series on the other hand which you can get the base unit for under $500, depending on how many analogue trunks and extensions you want.

I should note that it is not a trivial cost associated with moving to VoIP – if you have existing analogue phones the cheapest way will be to use ATA devices such as the Linksys SPA8000. VoIP phones start at around the $200 which soon adds up.

The ATCOM looks fairly easy to set up. There will be a learning curve, but it is definitely within the scope of in house IT staff to create new extensions, reconfigure IVR menus, if not set up the whole system from scratch.

For the price, I would buy two, and keep one as a spare that I could drop the flash card into should anything happen to the other.

The Atcom IP01 / IP04 / IP08 can handle around 30 concurrent calls, which is plenty for any small to medium business in New Zealand.

My immediate reaction when I saw this was to buy it just because it was so unbelievably cheap. Unfortunately, being a student means that isn’t quite a good enough reason to buy one.

Update: July 2009
I still haven’t tried out any of the ATCOM gear. I have to say I am nervous about the quality, I’d love to think it would be excellent, but until I have tested it I won’t know. In New Zealand of course you are probably still going to want analogue trunks instead of relying on 2talk/SIP trunks unless you have a really nice internet connection.

Usually I would write this the other way around, and rave on for a bit then talk about my experience, but in the interests in not boring you too much I will skip to the review. Update: Because this post got far too long, I actually split into two posts.

My experience has been absolutely flawless, every call perfect quality, no dropped calls or degraded quality. I signed up for the $15/month personal plan, in which you get 500 minutes and two NZ numbers. I used one of my allocated numbers for an 0800 number, and signed up for a local Greymouth number, so I could call my parents without even using any of my minutes (“local” calls are free).

After a slight muddle with passwords when I first signed up (I hadn’t read the thing telling me not to put symbols in my passwords) I was up and running within 15 minutes, including the time to download a SIP client for Mac. I’m using X-Lite at the moment.

I called myself on the landline, to check out the delay (It is pretty bad usually when I do it with Skype), it was totally insignificant, much less delay than a call to a mobile. They have a very featured web control panel to help set up auto attendants, call forwarding, voicemail, you name it they have it – even wake up calls. Obviously if I was going to do it seriously I would buy a SIP phone so I didn’t have to have the software open on my computer.

I should mention that I have a fibre connection back to Snap which I get around 17Mbps up and down on, so I am not exactly trialling it on an average NZers connection. I’m hoping to give the service a try at work over the summer break, where I will move a few of the lines going into our PABX over to 2talk and see how it goes.

(My ping to sip.2talk.co.nz at the moment is ~18ms)

I would highly recommend giving this a try. I just signed up for a month to give it a go because it was so exciting, I won’t be keeping the service as I am a student so unfortunately can’t quite justify it.

I can’t help but thinking how great it would be if I went travelling overseas etc, get a nice phone with a SIP client and wifi, sign up with a local number in NZ, and call all I like for practically nothing.

Let me know how you get on!

My initial plan was to use a VoIP provider, purchase various numbers around the country, and use geographical routing on our 0800 number to route calls to the local numbers we had purchased (as 0800 calls to local regions cost less).  Enter 2talk.

2talk provide a Business Go plan, you can check it out on the site, but with it, you can buy 0800 numbers and you don’t need to have them terminating to a number – meaning we don’t need to bother with setting up local numbers around the country. What is even better, is that the 0800 numbers first use up the minutes that you get as part of the plan – and their Go plan you get unlimited minutes! So that means, unlimited minutes of 0800 calls, and unlimited outbound calls, (Reasonable small business use applies).

The 0800 numbers cost exactly the same as getting a number anywhere else in the country, currently $7 a month, but that plan actually includes 2 NZ numbers as it is.

With the Go plan, you can have 5 simultaneous calls, something which is quite hard to get my head around after being used to landlines, where you get one call per line. Each additional phone number you purchase, you get an extra simultaneous call.

The potential for savings for small businesses here is incredible. Just take a look at these numbers:

Telecom NZ – for City customers: $37.05/line/month.
5 lines x $37.05 = $185.25 / month

2Talk – Anywhere in the country: $7/line/month
5 lines x $7 =  $35 / month
5 calls, unlimited minutes = $80 / month.

Whatever way you look at it, there are huge savings to be made. They do number porting for the same price, they even have numbers in little places like Greymouth – as far as I am aware they are the only place providing local numbers in Greymouth!