Cisco CUBE deployment to reduce legacy PRI circuits
January 30, 2019

Cisco CUBE deployment to reduce legacy PRI circuits

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Unified Border Element (CUBE)

CUBE is currently deployed as an SBC for our enterprise SIP platform to bring the service into our CUCM environment as we transition off of a plethora of PRI circuits scattered across our locations. The reliability and ease of integration (through documentation and support) into our network has really allowed us to expedite our move away from legacy telco circuits.
  • As with any Cisco appliance, the support from the TAC is one of the top benefits.
  • Familiar CLI if you're already working within a Cisco environment.
  • Basic configuration between CUCM and CUBE is fairly straight forward to set up.
  • The expense of the device to run CUBE may have you looking outside Cisco for options.
  • Requires additional DSPs for transcoding operations.
  • There's a bit of a learning curve in getting this set up to work with your specific provider when using this as a SIP gateway.
  • With the deployment we were able to provide a consistent, easier to support, and central SIP solution. This is not specific to CUBE, but specific to the reason it was deployed.
  • We were able to disconnect legacy PRI circuits and reduce those costs.
  • We were able to go to usage based trunks to put our trunking costs more in-line with our actual usage.
To be fair to CUBE and AudioCodes, my experience with AudioCodes was over 4 years ago, so their interfaces and CLI may have seen some revisions/updates. CUBE provides a unified CLI experience with the rest of your existing enterprise Cisco environment, whereas AudioCodes blend of a UI and CLI feel a little "90's" in comparison. It certainly can be a tad more friendly to someone just getting a feel for network devices, but the actual feature set felt harder to use as a result.

I didn't have any reliability issues or stability issues with either device, though and the AudioCodes solution is less costly, generally speaking, if it will work for your environment.
If you are in an environment that is primarily Cisco and switching from PRI circuits or other non-SIP circuits and are generally considered to be on an enterprise-grade platform, CUBE is likely a solid choice for you. From my experience, I cannot speak to the video handling that CUBE offers as we do not employ that, so hopefully other reviews will provide insight on that.