[VoiceOps] Vendor Pros\Cons

[Mike Johnston]

I feel I should also mention that even though the C15's CLI is a 
bit...old school, the platform is quite robust.  Especially if you are 
using SIP, there are very few failure modes that would cause a service 
impacting event.  Everything is redundant and can generally shift the 
call flows around failing hardware on the fly.  We've performed major 
software upgrades of the C15s while holding an uninterrupted SIP phone 
call during the entire upgrade.  From the day it's powered on, until the 
day it is replaced with something else, you can expect the C15s to be 
constantly operational (except for that time a tech dropped a wrench 
across the battery terminals).

They also have great TDM support, but some hardware failures, of course, 
will take down in-progress TDM calls.  That is, if the call is on a T1 
that is connected to a port module that just died, then that call will 
need to be re-established on a different T1 that is a port module that 
is still working.  I feel that this sort of concern is nothing new to 
people who are used to working with TDM, though.

The C15 support from Ribbon is amazing.  The technicians are very 
friendly, very patient, very accommodating, and always very 
understanding of what it is you are trying to accomplish.  I've had a 
couple times where I've had a feature request (or maybe you could argue 
a bug/non-RFC compliant behavior), and they fixed the issue.  However, 
for one of them, that fix took quite a while.  But, they want changes to 
their code to be very thoughtful and well tested.  This keeps their 
platform stable, very stable (see my first paragraph).

If you want to have a Hosted PBX offering, I do not feel the C15 is good 
fit for that.   We use FreeSWITCH for Hosted PBX, and link each virtual 
customer to the C15 with a SIP trunk (the C15 calls it a SIP PRI).