Has anyone had any recent direct experience with the EdgeWater EdgeMarc 4610W multi-service appliance used as a CPE device?
I was recently handed a sales sheet on this swiss-army knife appliance, but there doesn't seem to be much publically available review of the beastie at the moment. If it is as advertised, it would be a very handy device as a CPE option...
Thanks,
Jaimie L.
I am scatter brained at the moment so I will kind of babble along some
bullet points.
We have been using Edgemarcs for a while and we love it for hosted
VoIP situation. Their strength is VoIP.
Being able to failover SIP servers and Internet access connection is great.
You can configure it so you can still make internal calls when the SIP
server is unavailable or your internet connection is down.
I have not used the wireless model so I don't know much about that part.
We had some problem with some VPN to Cisco when you have more than one
subnet that needed to tunnel through.
The annoying part is when you change anything on the device, it will
say voice traffic may get interrupted. I have not gotten around to
test what kind of affect it has on voice when you change simple
configuration. But it kind of gets old when you get the message when
you are changing the DHCP server setting and you know it has nothing
to do with passing VoIP packets along.
Their support is pretty good.
This thing is basically a linux box with Asterisk and Swan rolled into one.
Sometimes if you need to do things that can't be done from the GUI,
you can get around it by using some basic Linux/Asterisk CLI/config
files. But that can get ugly fast.
If you have VoIP, it's great! If not, I usually stick with a Cisco ISR.
Haven't had my hands on the 4610W yet, but I've been using (and have been a
big fan of) Edgemarcs for some time. It does what it says and well, I love
the support guys, and their price point is much better than most of the
competitors.
Some of my favorite features do come from the fact that they are Linux
based, such as being able to run tcpdump for troubleshooting SIP signaling
(or any network issue) in real time.
They also have a really nice EMS that's quite worth it if you have enough of
these deployed. It can alert on call quality issues based on MOS score, as
well as standard up/down status.
The only real "downside" is the licensing of concurrent calls. The
licensing of the T1's is actually really nice so that you can get the box at
a lower pricepoint, but grow it in service if you need more T1 capacity
later on.
If anyone has any more specific questions about using these in the real
world I'd be happy to answer.
-Scott