Switchvox is an IP PBX supporting business phone systems, allowing users to simplify communications down to one solution delivered on-premise or hosted in the Cloud. Switchvox Cloud is a fully-featured Unified Communications (UC) solution designed for SMBs, featuring presence, instant messaging, conferencing, and mobility, for a monthly rate starting at $19.99.
Switchvox was developed by Digium and now owned and supported by Sangoma since the 2018 acquisition.
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Grandstream UCM series IP PBXs
Score 8.4 out of 10
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Grandstream presents the UCM series of IP PBX appliances as powerful yet easy to manage voice, video, data, and mobility communications platform, whichoffer an extensive set of unified communication features in an easy to manage on premise solution with no licensing fees, upgrade fees or costs per features. The Grandstream UCMs range from small and medium business deployments to small and medium enterprise solutions.
Really Digium Switchvox is a great product, it's more of an overall service and it's great. Starting at the phones, I think they're well engineered, from button placement to make call handling a breeze, bright status indicators and programmable keys that keep things simple, and a clear back-lite screen, to light up those late night support calls. I've watched the web management interface grow into a gorgeous, friendly, informational tool that gives me a system that can do 95% of the things my customers request. The only times I've seen it as less appropriate is when it comes to the more budget restricted. I've always believed you get what you pay for, and Digium Switch provides a lovely packaged, turnkey product, that doesn't require an expert to maintain once installed. On top of that, you're paying for the service. I can speak from experience, and countless support calls, that Digium Switchvox's support is second to none. They're efficient, intelligent, friendly, and professional, I've never had a bad experience, keep up the great work!
As a PBX the UCM PBX can be cover the needs of all companies without exception. We think it is really a great and flexible solution that covers all the IP telephone needs a company may have. When we were researching the market to buy our pair of UCM 6308, we had also hoped to use it as a replacement for our Skype for Business installation, so to say to use it as our main solution for video conferencing. After trying to do this for a couple of years we would say that you can use Wave for video conferencing and I personally like it, but it is not well suited for bigger companies for using it as the main video conferencing solution. On the other hand, there are very few PBXs even offering a video conferencing solution and their solutions are not better that the UCM's solution!
I've installed quite a few of these systems for a number of customers, and I've found a number of times having access to the second Ethernet port on some of the larger systems, and the ability to do some sort of static routing, and firewall functionality. I would love to have the ability to connect one port to the carrier's cpe router, and the other port to the customer's network.
I've worked with Voip products for a number of years, and various asterisk iterations. I'd like to see more access to the asterisk cli for troubleshooting, and/or potentially some sort of shell access.
I'd like to see the Digum Switchvox phones have vpn functionality. It would be great to deploy a field office with a pre-provisioned phone that automatically connects back to the corporate network via a secure vpn tunnel from most internet connections. Currently we either use a softphone, manually program a Cisco phone that does have the capability, or deploy an semi expensive router that support a secure tunnel. It would be much easier to sell a customer on a remote office and a fancy Digium phone, if they didn't need the extra hardware.
The cluster implementation does not work on all network modes. Would be great if this was improved.
Wave on mobile phones works in a different way than on desktops and this makes it hard to set it up for use on the firewalls, as it requires different and more permissions than the desktop app. For example is one receives an invitation per email on the mobile phone and wants to participate in a Wave meeting as a guest, the still need access to the network ports needed to login the extension (while they only need / want to join the meeting as anonymous users). On the desktop app this is not needed.
There is a limit on the number of 1 device per connection type. We have an extension used in the maintenance department and is shared by 6 users. We were able to install it on 1 PC, 1 Wi-Fi phone and 1 Android shared mobile phone. We would like to install it on a second shared mobile phone, but this is not allowed by the UCM policy. We could use anther extension to do this, but the maintenance department does not want this. They want to accept calls with problem reports only on one extension. Would be great to be able to install the same extension on more than 1 Android devices.
We are very happy with our UCB 6308 pair. We have some issues that we would like to see improved, but the UCM 6308 does more than cover the main functionality it is intended for and has given us the needed solution for our remote workers.
Although we are very happy with our pair of UCM 6308, we still think there are some things that can be improved to make this a prefect product! Have mentioned the main points we think that should be improved on other parts of the review.
Grandstream almost always have a first response on any ticket within 24 hours, which is impressive. They do care to listen about customer problems and needs and are open suggestions / feature reuests, as long as there is a potential for the suggested change to benefit a big enough number of customers.
I've installed, and maintained a number of different phone systems over the last few years, including nationwide level Voip service providers relying entirely on custom built Asterisk systems, to SOHO systems connected to cloud level services. So far Digium Switchvox has been one of my favorites when it comes to ease of use, customer service, and over all reliability. While there are a few things I'd like to see done a little differently, updates are released frequently with fixes, and new features.
We were considering a solution from Alcatel at first. Very stable implementation for sure, as there are no frequent updates and no new features. Also no conferencing solution was included. A separate solution was offered for extra cost. So the choice was between a very stable PBX which would be pretty much unchanged for ever and a dynamic solution that would constantly grow. Without any doubt we opted for the ever growing / changing solution, knowing this would cost us in minor problems / instabilities. We did NOT regret this decision. So having opted for a growing and constantly developed solution we also look into the solution provided by Yeastar. By comparing the 2 solutions it was obvious that the Grandstream UCM 6308 was the best solution for us.
