Cisco Unified Computing System Adapters (UCS VICs) vs. Lumen Next-Generation SIP Voice Services

In general, the company has had significant improvements, where the software has allowed us to have a more fluid and, above all, stable communication system. For many things, I would recommend it, from its level of efficiency to how easy it can be to manipulate it. With a simple implementation. Much faster and cleaner service.

Incentivized

CenturyLink SIP is an acceptable solution if you have an on-prem PBX (ShoreTel, Mitel, etc) that accepts SIP. I have found a better solution is to run two different carriers through SD-WAN (such as Bigleaf or Velocloud MSR) and use a provider like BCMOne (formerly NexVortex) to manage the SIP.

Incentivized

• Easy Installation, Migration and At A Glance Resource Monitoring
• Enhanced Server Virtualization and Systems Integration
• Reduction Of Bare Metal Servers
• Network Load Distribution

Incentivized

• Reliable service
• Supports wide range of key features
• They do have high levels of support where you can receive real answers

Incentivized

• High product price and warranty service.
• Official product documentation can be improved.

Incentivized

• Lumen-Centurylink has suffered from many noticeable outages in the last few years - this is a blow to their reputation that they still have to recover from.
• Lumen-CenturyLink does not peer well enough with OTHER carriers - they depend on their own network to give you SIP, which means less true redundancy.
• Lumen-CenturyLink needs a better customer portal/interface to handle failover, see the real-time status, etc.

Incentivized

SIP service support is definitely improving. A few years ago I would have rated them a 2. Now a 7. But, Lumen still needs a better portal experience to report and see a real-time status. Also to manage SIP failover functions in a WYSIWIG/GUI interface. When Lumen's network breaks in a larger outage, there are long hold times and support is not good.

Incentivized

When using UCS B-Series, there is no real other choice. For implementations leveraging UCS C-Series, we evaluated based on what connectivity is available, the power of the VIC's really comes when connecting to a UCS Fabric Interconnect, though they can be used standalone. When using standalone, unless implementing to increase the number of physical ports, there are more cost effective options such as the Intel X540.

Incentivized

CenturyLink [Enterprise Voice SIP] was the incumbent, so switching providers, particularly for our HQ was an overwhelming task for our small team. We did migrate from the legacy CenturyLink voice product EIPT to the new Voice Complete solution as well as upgrade our US and UK circuits along with a hardware upgrade of the managed PE routers in each location. We also decided to implement RingCentral in one of our very small international branches but the lack of features is problematic. We still have T1 service in our other international branches but are looking to go full cloud SaaS PBX there, likely through Microsoft Teams, which we already use for messaging. There are some complexities, as we can't port our numbers directly yet and need to set up an additional CUBE router for SIP. Eventually we hope to get to fully SaaS via Teams.

Incentivized

• Data center enhancement. To scale up new UCS servers, manage VMs, physical servers in a unified way and reduce maintenance time and expenses.

Incentivized

• Faster learning
• Increased numbers of calls
• Organization of calls

Incentivized