Voip > blog
Voip Blog
Grandstream Goes PBX With The GXE 502x Products
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
I've always been impressed at the ambition of Grandstream's IP telephones. I have a Budgetone 100 and a GXP2000 sitting in my VoIP gear box in my office. They were decent phones for their time, and were fairly functional. However, I always found myself wanting more in terms of overall product stability and build quality from these two phones.
Recently, I've received word they've taken it a step farther and built their own IP PBX: the GXE 502x line of products. There are two models: the lower-end GXE 5024 and the higher-end GXE 5028. The main differences are the number of ports--the GXE 5024 supports 4 analog extensions whereas the GXE 5028 supports 8, the number of conference rooms (2 versus 4), and the amount of flash memory to store things like voicemail.
Both products will support up to 100 registered VoIP extensions with 50 simultaneous VoIP calls supported, can connect to two analog telephone lines for making and receiving calls, and support Power-over-Ethernet.
The product isn't shipping as of yet, but is currently in beta test. I haven't decided if I want to sign up and get the product to test it. Of course, I have a PBX here from a different vendor that I still need to test with.
One error that I see in the manual up-front is that Grandstream mixes up the use of FXS and FXO. Anyone who have ever taken an analog telephone line and plugged it into the FXS port of an analog telephone adapter can tell you that getting this wrong is a great way to wreck your equipment. FXS ports are for analog telephones, FXO ports are for analog phone lines that connect to a local telephone company.
This could be an interesting product. Hopefully the build quality, both in hardware and software, will be improved over my past experience.
