Askozia PBX

I've been using the Askozia PBX for about a month now for my small business at home and I wanted to quickly share my results.

Previously I used VoIP.co.uk directly over the internet. First of all with a cheap WiFi phone from ebay (Senao I think, it looked like a Nokia 6310). This was useless because it cut out the call after 45 seconds every time...

Then I upgraded to a ZyXEL Prestige 2000W V2 VoIP WiFi which was much better. Sometimes the call quality was not so good for the other party but it always sounded fine for me! (A word of warning: This doesn't support WPA).

Then I upgraded to Cisco fixed phones with a Cisco 7940 big feature phone (pictured above) and a Cisco 7912 desk phone. On top of that I've now got a Linksys ATA for my DECT phone, and the Nokia E90 Communicator which makes a superb WiFi SIP client.




VoIP.co.uk is very feature packed. You can have many different lines within one VoIP.co.uk, you can have many different devices in your account and set which numbers go to which lines, have call groups essentially, do voicemail which is emailed to you, do all sorts of stuff.

Up until a month or so ago I have always lived with niggles. Sometimes the other person wouldn't be able to hear me, sometimes I wouldn't be able to hear them, sometimes the call would drop, etc.

So I decided to take NAT out of the equation and run my own PBX. I built a MiniITX diskless, fanless PC from www.mini-itx.com (identical to my Monowall router) and chose the Askozia PBX project for my PBX. Askozia is basically a GUI for Asterisk but its presented as a nice simple download and a nice easy web interface. No complicated Linux or Asterisk to worry about.

My results so far have been excellent, and the functionality that the PBX offers is incredible and growing with every release. As an example I now have three SIPGate accounts, each with one number. These are setup in Askozia and the system is set to ring my call group "All Phones" if I get a call on any number...the clever part is I have set the PBX to prefix the callerID with each of my company names.

So when someone calls number 1 the callerID on my phones comes up with "Company1 - 01234123123" so that I know how to answer the phone. This is really useful for me as a small (micro?) business with a few brands but its only scratching the surface of what Askozia can do.

The best part is so far I haven't had any call drop outs and I seem to have ironed out all of the sound problems (I had some problems to start with with the codecs supported by the Ciscos and Askozia not being right).

VoIP.co.uk only intermittently works with my Askozia box so I've canned that and diverted all of the numbers in my account to my 3 SIPgate accounts (SIPgate accounts are free). Its a shame that VoIP.co.uk isnt reliable because it has a lot of features where SIPGate is very very minimalist...but ultimately its reliability that matters and that's what my SIPGate/ Askozia combination seems to give me (fingers crossed).

Askozia is an open source active public beta project and the development team are very keen to hear of bugs, etc. If you want to run a small, non-critical PBX but don't want the hassle of Asterisk, etc. have a look at it and perhaps get involved. www.askozia.com